"Attending a performance is tantamount to a sexual crime," is how one critic responded to Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten ("The Branded") during its first run in Frankfurt, in 1918. An extreme, symbolist study of the relationships between art, sex and death, Schreker's opera has provoked comparisons with Wagner and Freud, though it comes closer to Sade in its equation of sex with aggression and fatality.
The heroine, Carlota, is a painter who suffers from a heart condition that will kill her if she experiences orgasm. Two men are irrevocably drawn to her: Aviano, a deformed nobleman, who shares both her longing for platonic companionship and her need to sublimate desire to artistic expression; and Tamare, a charismatic sensualist, who knowingly offers her the lethal erotic pleasures she also craves, and who ultimately gains supremacy. Carlota willingly dies during an orgy on an island off the Genoese coast, a symbolic terrain where Tamare and his cronies have group sex in the caverns beneath the extravagant fantasy palaces that Aviano has constructed.
Some have fought shy of the piece, though director Nikolaus Lehnhoff has bravely undertaken a new production for the Salzburg festival. It's startling stuff. The set consists of a vast, broken statue of a supine naked woman who weeps blood at moments of violation. The programme acknowledges Pasolini's Salo as an influence, though the orgy scenes, with masked voyeurs spying on coupling androgynes, are closer to Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Wary of a work that equates disability with emotional repression, Lehnhoff turns Aviano into an isolated, if glamorous transvestite. The shift remains ideologically awkward, though Robert Brubaker gives a performance of such harrowing emotional depth that you just about overlook it.
Anne Schwanewilms is a fraction too cool as Carlota, though Michael Volle, a great artist, is sexual danger incarnate as Tamare. Conducted by Kent Nagano, the score, all chromatic suspensions and slithers, seeps and oozes round you. Erotic and repellent in equal measure, it's a great achievement.
· In rep until August 7. Box office: 43-662-8045 500.
