Milo Rau’s Three-Hour Wagner Debut Splits Berlin Audience

By Tom Whitfield

Milo Rau’s three-hour staging of Richard Wagner’s O Holandês Voador (The Flying Dutchman) opened at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in October. The production recast a German legend as a political study of Germany, Israel and the Palestinian cause.

Rau set the opera against Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The captain and his ship stand for German guilt for the Holocaust. Senta offers Israel as a route to absolution, while Erik represents the Palestinian cause.

The historical frame runs from the post-Holocaust period to the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Projected texts and filmed images recorded in Israel and the West Bank connect that argument to the stage.

The premiere: police, applause and boos

A strong police presence accompanied the October opening. The audience divided between applause and boos. During the final bows, a man in the auditorium shouted the words “nazis” and “Jew-haters” at the cast.

Those scenes show a hostile reception at the curtain call. They do not establish the audience’s overall verdict. The report offers no attendance figure or count of applause against boos.

Negative reviews, divided spectators

A Der Tagesspiegel columnist said the staging brought nothing new to the opera. The Süddeutsche Zeitung said the work “fails spectacularly.” Neither paper offered a positive verdict.

The spectators’ response was less uniform. Anno Mungen, a 65-year-old professor, praised the absence of clear answers. Other spectators struggled to follow the overlapping videos and text. The reports show disagreement, not a settled verdict on the three-hour production.

Rau on pressure inside and outside the opera house

Rau, 49, said he maintained his vision despite a climate of “self-censorship.” He also reported that members of the Deutsche Oper team tried to simplify the work’s complexity. His account identifies two pressures: the political climate and attempts to reduce the production’s scope.

The wider context is sharper. Artists and intellectuals in Germany report political pressure and the loss of prizes when they criticize Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip. The report names no affected artists or prizes and does not document either measure as a response to this production.

What does this change for artists who criticize Israel?

The Deutsche Oper is due to receive €56 million from the Berlin government and €3.5 million from the federal government in 2027. The figures put the funding stakes in concrete terms. The report does not say that either grant is conditional on Rau’s staging.

German Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer said funding guidelines must make clear that the state cannot finance antisemitism with public money. The report does not say that the Deutsche Oper’s grants depend on the opera’s political position.

Annemie Vanackere, director of the HAU Hebbel am Ufer, said smaller institutions face less scrutiny. She warned that artists dependent on specific subsidies could lose those funds if their views were classified as antisemitic. Her account concerns funding conditions in general, not a sanction against this production.

For artists who criticize Israel’s conduct, the practical change is a wider risk: dedicated grants may come with political tests. Weimer’s criteria remain unspecified in the report, and no example shows a funding decision following such a classification.

The report records no funding penalty for Rau’s staging; the sharper risk lies in the criteria that future funding decisions will apply.