Isaiah Berlin recounts an operatic disaster

 

Far the most absurd moment in opera that I know of was seen not, alas, by me, but by my friend Nicolas Nabokov in Berlin, in the early 1920s. It was during the years of inflation, when there was much poverty and a great dearth of food in Germany. The opera was Götterdämmerung. Nabokov described the moment when Brünnhilde’s faithful Grane, played by an emaciated and  evidently starved carthorse, appeared on the stage; a foot away stood Hagen, with a long tow beard suspended from his chin. The horse suddenly lunged forward, whipped off Hagen’s beard and devoured it in one gulp. This apparently stopped the performance; while the feeble old horse was being hurried off the stage even the solemn German audience could not contain itself.



 

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