Risveglio di primavera

They act incorrectly those who present sex to those who learn it as a natural, clean, innocent and obvious thing. Instead, those who show it to them as something unnatural, and therefore dirty, dangerous and incomprehensible, are right.

Bertolt Brecht, Fatzer

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Good, old-fashioned morality. It is an old word, which is no longer used. With the addition of a single letter it becomes deadly (and how many deaths it has done, and how many deaths it continues to to do). It was all people talked about in the late nineteenth century, and it is in the name of morality that the boys in Spring Awakening are forbidden knowledge of the world that will lead them to death. It is hardly mentioned now; perhaps it has taken other names. But every time violence is justified, every time comments are made about the clothes of a raped and murdered girl, every time a victim is inflicted, morality is alive and fighting against us.

Immoralism, on the other hand, has aged much worse. That counter-moralism that often surfaces in Spring Awakening today makes us smile. For several times it has been taken as the "message" ofopera, making the text a ...kind of pro-sex education manifesto to . But there is a masked figure who breathes through all ofopera and removes it from the rhetoric; he is Mephistopheles, who has come straight from Goethe's Faust to making the knowledge pursued by boys an act as vital as it is dark. In every man's heart is the devil; no act is innocent removed from the erasure of self. That is all.

On a more personal note. This text is a doorway to something I thought I had forgotten. Toward the feeling of impending tragedy, of the horrific overthrow of the world that during my adolescence dulled my mind. I never could to say anything about that feeling, to name it, or to share it with anyone. Several years later I encountered Wedekind's text and heard it again sounding "like a series of obscure memories, like a tune that one has hummed quietly from boy and that, on the verge of death, comes to him from the lips of another and upsets his heart." I thank the six actors of the two-year residency for so courageously following my lead in traversing this territory.

John Ortoleva