HEADS ON A PLATTER

posted by James Reel

    Follow this link to a story recently broadcast on All Things Considered:

    One of the leading opera houses in Germany has cancelled a production because a scene that might offend Muslims could create a security threat.
    The production of the opera Idomeneo features a scene in which a character presents the severed heads of religious leaders—including Jesus, the Buddha and Muhammad. [The Bloomberg news service also mentions Poseidon in this company.]
    The Deutsche Oper in Berlin said police had warned that staging the production could pose a security risk to the opera house, its employees and patrons.

    According to Bloomberg, “German press agency DPA said Berlin police have so far recorded no direct threat to the opera house.”
    There’s an AP version of the story in the Arizona Daily Star. Note that this is a three-year-old production, so Idomeneo has been prancing around with those heads for a great many performances already.
    I avoid discussing religion and politics on this blog—you can find lots of that elsewhere—so I won’t comment on this situation, except to observe the notable absence of one head you’d expect to be in the company of those religious figures: Moses. Of course, this production is in Germany, the nation that brought us the Holocaust a couple of generations ago, after which even a director like Hans Neuenfels apparently would not dare to suggest the decapitation of Moses.
    What do you think—if Muslims and Christians are in for this kind of stage treatment, should Jews be as well, even in Germany? If Jews are off limits, should everyone else be, too? And should Deutsche Oper have dumped the whole production, or even just that one bit of stage business, because officials feared violent reprisals from one potentially offended group, even though no threats had yet been made?