If the goal of art is to reflect whatever happens to be going on in contemporary society, it should come as no surprise that there has been a steady increase in the number of opera productions set in fascistic near-future dystopias. Although several have appeared on Berlin stages in recent years, Lydia Steier’s new staging of Spontini’s La Vestale – the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s first new production of the 2026/27 season – was arguably the best executed, and easily the most brutal. Despite a magnificent performance from Sonya Yoncheva in the central role, the violence of the staging – and its all-too-obvious relevance to the present day – often made for an uneasy evening.
Spontini, who had relocated from Italy to Paris, wrote La Vestale at a curious time in the history of opera, several decades after the innovations of Gluck had made their mark on operatic form, but a good twenty years before the efforts of Rossini and Meyerbeer conspired to make French opera ‘grand’. La Vestale was ambitious for its time and, in addition to being a popular success, it also attracted many admirers among the subsequent generation of musical dramatists; indeed, if the opera is not better known today, it is almost certainly because composers such as Berlioz, Verdi and even Wagner took Spontini’s advances and did them even better. But while most of Spontini’s other works have fallen into complete obscurity, La Vestale is revived periodically as a soprano showcase.
The libretto’s Roman setting provides a convenient pretext for a fairly schematic tale of forbidden love: Julia, the story’s protagonist, has been unwillingly initiated into the cult of vestal virgins while her would-be lover, Licinius, was away making a name for himself on the battlefield. If the basic outline gave Spontini ample raw material for a simply and elegantly constructed tragedy, director Lydia Steier used the twin ideas of a repressive regime and an equally repressive religious cult devoted to the ideal of female purity to take the story in directions that were more topical and considerably darker.
Spontini: La Vestale. Carlo Rizzi, conductor. Lydia Steier, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, september 2026. © 2026 by Stephan Rabold.
Ms Steier has directed two other productions for the Staatsoper in the last five years, both of which placed extraordinary technical skills in the service of visions that seemed to revolve around whimsical pop-camp (La fanciulla del west) or fanciful nostalgia (Les contes d’Hoffmann). If those stagings often felt too obvious, that same lack of subtlety, when paired with a much darker thematic palette, yielded extraordinary results. Her vision for La Vestale simmered with a near-constant violence – both physical and psychological – that created an atmosphere of unrelenting hopelessness.
The Roman trappings of the original were updated to a stylised military dictatorship in which dissent was supressed by means of torture and most of the women had been inducted into a religious order involving shaved heads, black gowns and vows of chastity (somewhat tellingly, the programme booklet reprinted a passage from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). The primary set, which doubled as both the vestal headquarters and the ceremonial hall of the government appeared to be a crumbling neo-classical library from which all books had been removed (it was, in fact, based on the Sorbonne); in the second act it was revealed that the eternal flame guarded by the vestals is fuelled by wheelbarrows full of the very printed volumes that would once have sat on the now-damaged shelves. (It was especially sobering to watch these scenes in such close proximity to Berlin’s Bebelplatz, the site of the twentieth century’s most notorious book-burning rally).
If the setting made it obvious that the story was unfolding within a world of ignorance and fanaticism, it was the treatment of people on stage – both the main characters and the incidental background figures – that gave the staging its disquieting edge. Ms Steier missed no opportunity to include reasonably graphic scenes of physical violence, starting as early as the overture (in which a random political prisoner is beaten and tortured) and reaching a disturbing plateau in the first vestal temple scene, in which one impious vestal is brutally expelled, her replacement (against her will) has her hair shorn, and the Grand Vestal administers a bloody beating to Julia as a precaution against any potential transgressions. The efficiency of both the vestals and the surrounding soldiers at administering punishment for even the smallest infractions gave the staging a mood of claustrophobic dread that continued undiminished for the opera’s full three hours, and left one in no doubt that both Julia and Licinius were doomed. While the libretto offers an unconvincingly happy resolution, Ms Steier’s treatment of the final scenes were considerably more plausible within the chilling world she had created.
Spontini: La Vestale. Carlo Rizzi, conductor. Lydia Steier, director. Berlin, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, september 2026. © 2026 by Stephan Rabold.
The action of La Vestale revolves around a reasonably small group of characters, each given a performance of distinction on this evening. Sonya Yoncheva established herself early as the opera’s vocal centre, rising subtly above the vestal choir in her introductory scene. But while there was no question that hers was the most commanding voice on the stage, she never deployed her rich tone and effortless projection in the service of mere showing-off. Rather, her performance remained fully committed to the plight of the character, which was rendered grandly tragic over the course of several excellent solo scenes.
The first act aria was an eloquent statement of despair, majestic in its delivery while remaining fundamentally inward-facing; instead of overloading the auditorium with obvious emotion, Ms Yoncheva allowed us momentary glimpses into a much larger struggle. The second act was even better: her first solo scene paired tonal breadth with immediacy of feeling (even if the orchestra couldn’t quite match her intensity), the conclusion of the duet with Licinius featured some of the evening’s finest singing, and the lyrical flow of her final aria yielded one of the evening’s vocal highlights. And while the third act was largely given over to dramatic confrontations, Ms Yoncheva was nonetheless able to make space for a gentle and heartfelt solo scene.
Marina Prudenskaya, as the Grand Vestale, provided Ms Yoncheva’s Julia with a worthy adversary: with her generous tone and undisputed stage charisma she turned her first act aria into a calculating statement of intent; and while the character can grow somewhat peripheral to the action as the opera progresses, Ms Prudenskaya ensured that the Vestale remained a formidable presence throughout the evening. David Butt Philip was a compelling Licinius, full of convincing anguish in the first act and overflowing with ardour in the second. Although he had a number of fine solo moments, it was the presence of others that seemed to inspire his finest singing: his duet with the unfailingly elegant Cinna of Siyabonga Maqungo in the first act – the bright clarity of Mr Maqungo and the dusky breadth of Mr Philip complemented one another wonderfully – was an early highlight, his clash with Adrian Sâmpetrean’s high priest in the third act was one of the evening’s more intense dramatic scenes, and, of course, the duet with Ms Yoncheva in the second provided the evening with a majestic centrepiece.
Spontini may have looked to Gluck for inspiration, but much of the music he wrote for La Vestale anticipates subsequent developments in the operatic genre, and Carlo Rizzi’s musical direction situated the score firmly within the nineteenth century. Although the orchestra was moderate in size, the music they produced often strove for the grand scale of later French opera. Admittedly there were a few moments where the singing would have benefitted from greater rhythmic drive: Julia’s first aria in the second act demanded more fiery accompaniment (although the solo horn in the introduction was excellent), and in the third act duet between Licinius and the high priest the music didn’t seem locked into the same groove at the two singers. However the first act, preceded by a sparkling overture, was perfectly paced, and the final scene of the second act reached almost Verdian levels of intensity.
For all its musical delights, the Staatsoper’s new La Vestale often made for uncomfortable viewing, and anyone coming to the opera in search of easy entertainment might well have left the auditorium in a state of agitation. Yet there are few stagings from recent years that have been able to pinpoint the half-formed fears of its audience with such ruthless precision, and fewer still that have been willing to take those fears to their logical conclusion. The true horror in Ms Steier’s bleak vision lay not so much in its violence, but in its distressing plausibility: everything she placed on stage has happened before … and if we’re not careful, it could all very easily happen again.
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