Krzisztof Penderecki - Die Teufel von Loudun - Troyanos, SoltinProduced 1969/70, released on DVD 2007
Tatiana Troyanos, Andrzej Hiolski, Bernhard Ladysz, Hans Sotin, Rolf Mamero, Cvetka Ahlin, and Helmut Melchert star in this 1969 Hamburg State Opera production of the Penderecki opera conducted by Marek Janowski.
Under the forward-thinking, often risk-taking regime of Rolf Liebermann—from 1959 to 1973—the Hamburg State Opera premiered many new works. Furthermore, Liebermann took 13 of his productions into the studio to be filmed for television. (Remember when television was regarded as an exciting medium for opera?) One of these was Penderecki’s controversial work, first performed in June 1969 and recorded a short time later with the original cast but a different conductor. (The young Janowski took over from Penderecki specialist Henryk Czyz.)
The opera is based on John Whiting’s dramatization of Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun, set to a German translation by Erich Fried. Huxley researched a documented incident which took place in the provincial town of Loudun in August 1634: the torture and execution of a renegade Catholic priest, Urbain Grandier. Although Grandier had broken his vow of celibacy—repeatedly—the execution seems to have been politically motivated, a sortie in the vicious power struggle between Cardinal Richelieu and the Huguenots. Whiting’s point was that religious beliefs, particularly entrenched ones, may be manipulated for secular political ends. (But not today, of course!) Huxley, in the book, was also interested in the suppression of the sexual urge under the strictures of church dogma, and the psychological damage resulting from that inhibition. The latter theme is personified in Jeanne, the deformed Prioress who nurses a lust-driven obsession with Grandier, without ever having met him. In the course of her subsequent exorcism (female sexual desire being the work of the devil), she accuses Grandier of presiding over a black mass and corrupting the entire Ursuline nunnery.
