Claus Guth and The Inverted Dioramas

Abstract

This article focuses on the directorial aesthetics of Claus Guth, an artist that specialises in reinterpreting the lyric creations of the great opera houses worldwide. Disengaging or maybe understanding hidden meanings of the librettos and musical scores, speculating and reinventing the characters’ stories, the German director gives birth to new realities which mold to the original ones, transfiguring them in unexpected ways. The Messiah oratory by Georg Friedrich Händel is a good example, because the incoherent libretto that servs as foundation to the baroque composition is enriched by Claus Guth through a salutary intervention, in which the director questions matters such as religiosity and the intimate beliefs of the contemporary man. Similarly, other works I debate upon in this article test the limits of perception of the audience, not necesarrily because they are right or wrong interpretations, but rather because they tend to become possible points of view in understanding the characters, which are dislocated from their usual world and transported into another in which, with irony and humor, they are forced to reinvent themselves.