Converting to Verdi

The village of Oberammergau might be the least Jewish place on earth. Nestling at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, the town is synonymous with the Passion play that residents have been putting on since 1637, a theatrical and religious spectacle that for much of history transmitted anti-Jewish prejudice, inciting pogroms and other violent acts in nearby towns and, later, winning the admiration of Hitler, who attended the 1934 performance.

The streets are named for New Testament figures and crucifixes stare down from virtually every house. In other words, this is not a place where one might expect to find anything Jewish that prefigures Christianity.

And yet, this summer, the plaintive strains of “Va pensiero,” the famous lament of the Hebrew slaves in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Nabucco,” is filling the Passionstheater, the 4,700-seat auditorium where the Passion play will be presented for the next time in 2020.

Staged by Christian Stückl, the director of the Passion play since 1990 and the galvanizing force behind Oberammergau’s other theatrical outings over the past decade, “Nabucco” is the first opera put on during the village’s summertime festival, which became a yearly event only after the 2010 Passion play. Given Oberammergau’s natural resonance with religious themes, it should come as no surprise that Stückl has been drawn to plays with biblical motifs. Past summers have seen productions of Thomas Mann’s epic “Joseph and His Brothers,” Stefan Zweig’s little-seen “Jeremiah,” and the world-premiere of Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel’s drama “Moses.”

Stückl, who runs the Munich Volkstheater in addition to

Article source: http://forward.com/culture/312465/converting-to-verdi/