Backgrounds and Foregrounds

After two decades at Berlin’s Volksbühne, theatre director Frank Castorf made the transition into international opera notoriety in 2013 with his polarising Bayreuth production of Wagner’s Ring. His debut production for the Deutsche Oper Berlin, a season-opening staging of La Forza del Destino, may not have been quite as controversial, but it remained consistently provocative in the best sense of that word. If it did not work especially well as a staged drama – the emotional heavy lifting was entrusted almost entirely to Verdi’s score – its caustic intelligence and consummate skill made for a wholly compelling work of theatre. 

The melodrama of love and revenge in the opera unfolds against the War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s, but for this staging the action was updated to the time of the Spanish civil war for the first two acts, and…