Castellucci knows what you know but pretend to forget… that pastoral is a lie… always was. Those sunlit meadows and nymphs dancing? Bullshit. The world’s a wasteland and nature’s not your mother, she’s indifferent, she’s cold, she’ll bury you under six feet of snow and not think twice about it. So he takes Strauss’ Daphne, this 1938 opera dripping with late-Romantic longing, and strips it down to bone. No green anywhere. Just snow. Perpetual, pitiless snow falling on that Berlin stage like the universe giving up.
And you sit there in the Staatsoper watching this and something breaks open in your chest because Boecker’s Daphne isn’t some pastoral fantasy, she’s us, alienated, desperate, trying to find something pure in a world that’s fundamentally polluted by human want, human need, human fucking touch. She’s singing her luminous soprano lines and she’s already a ghost, already transforming into something non-human because humanity is the disease, right? That’s what Romeo Castellucci’s saying with that giant projection of Eliot‘s Waste Land title page, that modernist desolation bleeding into ancient myth.
Because the Greeks knew it too. Daphne runs from Apollo not because she’s coy, not because she’s playing virgin games, but because she sees what he represents, desire as consumption, love as annihilation. And when she becomes the laurel tree in Castellucci’s vision, it’s not romantic transformation, it’s escape, it’s the only way out. Guggeis lets that final metamorphosis stretch out, the orchestra doing all the work while the visual becomes pure abstraction, pure withdrawal from the human project.
Pape and Černoch can sing the hell out of their roles, and they do, but they’re irrelevant the moment Daphne chooses extinction over connection. That’s the radical move here. Romeo Castellucci’s not interested in redemption or reconciliation. He’s showing you what it looks like when someone would rather become mineral, vegetable, anything than remain human in a world this broken. The snow keeps falling. The stage stays empty. And somehow Strauss’ sublime late-Romantic orchestration sounds more desperately beautiful for it.