War has always been easier than peace

Soldiers in combat gear storm Geneva Cathedral. Two bring a radar device, the rest occupy the apse. Not with rifles, but with musical instruments. The Ensemble Contrechamps plays the Quattro pezzi per orchestra by the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, conducted by Barbara Hannigan. These are meditations by one of the most idiosyncratic composers of the 20th century, each of which evokes a single note, trembling and floating, aggressive and captivating at once, as if seeking to unite the poles of life within themselves.

This makes them a fitting choice for director Romeo Castellucci, considered a visually powerful magician and philosopher of contemporary musical theater. For his first production at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, he chose not the opera house, but the main church, dedicated to Saint Peter, where Jean Calvin once preached. Preaching, of course, isn't Castellucci's thing; rather, he's more interested in making references open to associations. And yet this opening image is clear, threatening, not theatrical: The war has reached the city where the Geneva Conventions were signed and, just a few houses from the cathedral, the Red Cross was founded.

To Scelsi's music, three meter-high white poles circle on the wooden platform, in front of which the audience sits in tight rows. They stretch lengthwise through the entire nave. The spectators are exposed to the poles, as it were, crossing each other and descending onto their heads. Later, people populate the wooden structure, a moving choir that, as if in a kind of birth, produces two soloists from its ranks: Hannigan and the countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński.

What is a universal fate in war is now condensed into the suffering of one person: that of the Mother of God beneath the cross. Hannigan and Orliński sing the Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, one of the most famous settings of the medieval sequence. The memory of the composer's early death always hangs like a shadow over every performance: "Finis laus Deo" – "The end, praise be to God," Pergolesi wrote ambiguously at the bottom of the manuscript before he died of tuberculosis in 1736 at the age of just 26. The orchestral part in Geneva will be performed by the Baroque ensemble Il Pomo d'Oro, playing in a small ensemble behind the tribune.

The overall musical direction is in the hands of Hannigan, who has long enjoyed equal success as a soprano and conductor, often on the same evening. For the arias and duets from the Stabat Mater, Castellucci gives her, Orliński, and the movement choir intense gestures that echo the visual topoi of the Stations of the Cross without directly quoting them. Bodies contort and arms stretch toward the sky, expressively as in medieval paintings.

Hannigan and Orliński approach Pergolesi's music quite differently: The soprano immerses herself almost veristically in Maria's pain, letting consonants crackle, drilling into top notes, and even leading her voice into extreme piano regions and breathy sounds. Orliński chooses more refined means, working with nuanced vocal colors and subtly sharpened intonation nuances, but above all relies on the sound of his voice, one of the most beautiful counterpoint voices of our time. A bittersweet vocal current flows through the austere yet soft timbre, which Orliński can flexibly shape and dynamically condense at any moment.

Both soloists are haunting, each in their own right; but together they open up the perspectives that music, indeed art in general, can take on human suffering: to subjectively adapt it or to describe it objectively. When Jesus breathes his last in the Stabat Mater, Hannigan stretches the stammered syllables of the Latin "e-mi-sit" to an almost unbearable slowness.

Outside, it's now dark, the cathedral's windows are blinded, an increasingly claustrophobic space that Castellucci and his co-lighting designer, Benedikt Zehm, subtly illuminate with hidden spotlights. This is the moment when the children of the Maîtrise du Conservatoire populaire de Genève come into play. Not singing at first, they carry in wooden fragments of a figure of the Crucified Christ, an allusion to the iconoclasm of the 16th century, in which the early Calvinists destroyed the cathedral's sculptures and paintings.

Apart from that, Castellucci needs only a few props: small green trees, wooden crossbeams, oranges instead of biblical apples. The production is still not without its share of complexity. It will be shown in Geneva for just one week, followed later by the opera houses in Rome and Antwerp, and possibly in other locations, provided a sufficiently large church can be found there. It would certainly be worthwhile, because Castellucci, who has recently fragmented several opera classics into overly convoluted images, finds a symbolism here in the free combination of pieces that is clear, yet not trite.

For example, when the three white rods at the beginning pierce Hannigan's robe like the sword in the Stabat Mater pierces the heart of the Mother of God. Or when she and Orliński strip off their black robes to enter "paradisi gloriam," the Resurrection, all in white. The symbols remain as simple and touching as the music at the end, which, once again, is by Giacinto Scelsi. Offstage, the children of the Maîtrise du Conservatoire populaire sing the first two of Scelsi's "Three Latin Prayers," monophonic melodies reminiscent of Gregorian chants. Then the audience is dismissed into the night without applause.

In doing so, Castellucci walks a line between theater and worship, between art and penitential ritual, which could easily slip into the realm of art-religion, even into art kitsch. That he doesn't do so has much to do with the memorable contrast to the beginning: the outbreak of war.

For with it comes a present in which a world war is once again treated as a real possibility, one in which leading Western politicians are calling on their nations to become "war-ready" again. As if they had forgotten that, in an emergency, atomic and hydrogen bombs would be more effective than any soldier. And that they could turn walls like Geneva Cathedral to dust in seconds.

Romeo Castellucci never forgets: While Barbara Hannigan sings the last of the "Three Latin Prayers," two soldiers return to the apparently still occupied church. They erect a wooden pole from which a present-day human being hangs, slumped. "Ecce homo": Do not forget, man, that you are dust. And that war has always been easier than peace.