Machine Guns Answer Spontini's Miracle at Staatsoper Berlin

Lydia Steier's production of Gaspare Spontini's "La Vestale" opened the Staatsoper Unter den Linden's 2026–27 season on September 26 — and it ends not with the opera's miraculous pardon but with machine-gun fire.

Premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1807 to a French libretto by Étienne de Jouy, the three-act tragédie lyrique became Spontini's international breakthrough. Dedicated to Empress Joséphine and born directly out of Napoleonic France, it combines monumental choral writing, orchestral color, ceremonial spectacle and private passion in ways that point toward Berlioz, Wagner and French grand opera. Today it is rarely performed.

Steier declines to reconstruct ancient Rome. Instead she places the action in an ominously recognizable totalitarian state where religion, military power and political ambition have become virtually indistinguishable.

The plot is simple. The Roman general Licinius returns victorious from war to find that his beloved Julia has been forced into the order of Vestal Virgins, bound by chastity and charged with tending Vesta's sacred flame. The lovers meet secretly in the temple; the flame goes out; Julia, refusing to name Licinius, is condemned to be buried alive. Lightning miraculously reignites the fire, the gods appear to speak, and Julia is pardoned and reunited with her lover.

Steier has little interest in that comforting conclusion.

The Architecture of Power

The production's argument begins in the overture. As Spontini's music surges with public grandeur, Licinius returns from battle not as a conquering hero but as a man hollowed out by victory — conqueror for the state, loser of everything personal. The opposition between public triumph and private devastation becomes the evening's central tension.

Over everything hangs the repeated Latin maxim Talis est ordo deorum — "Such is the order of the gods." In Steier's reading it functions less as an article of faith than as an instrument of control. Her mortals invoke divine order while relentlessly pursuing their own interests. The gods become an alibi for power.

Etienne Pluss's imposing set makes that power architectural. A vast institutional hall, possibly modeled on the amphitheater of the Sorbonne, mutates from assembly chamber to temple. Its monumental proportions carry unmistakable echoes of Fascist architecture — buildings conceived not to accommodate human beings but to make them aware of their own insignificance.

Most chillingly, the eternal flame is fed with books. The image carries particular weight in Berlin: the Nazi burning of more than thirty thousand books on May 10, 1933, took place a few hundred yards from the Staatsoper.

Katharina Schlipf's costumes complete the picture. Dark uniforms, sweeping capes, gold braid and epaulettes recall authoritarian pageantry, while the severely ritualized Vestals bring Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" insistently to mind. The women ostensibly guard the sacred order; in reality they rank among its most tightly controlled possessions.

Human Passion vs. State Control

Sonya Yoncheva stands at the center as Julia. She embodied the character with genuine passion and the dramatic vocal weight the role demands, making concrete a conflict between religious obligation, fear and erotic longing that can easily become abstraction. Her voice carried both the breadth of Spontini's ceremonial writing and the urgency of a woman choosing her own life.

David Butt Philip's full-bodied tenor gave Licinius considerable presence — but no triumph. From his first appearance he was a broken man, forced to confront and ultimately succumb to the seemingly immutable order of the gods. His singing captured the tension between the military hero the state expects and the desperate lover he has become.

Marina Prudenskaya's Grande Vestale was the system made flesh: severe, commanding, ruling her temple keepers with an iron hand. Yet Steier allows no one permanent power. Once the Grande Vestale has served her purpose, she is displaced by a younger, politically more useful Virgin.

Siyabonga Maqungo brought Cinna an exceptionally focused tenor, musical yet cutting in timbre. Under Steier, Licinius's erstwhile friend gradually emerges as the evening's political opportunist. The culmination is wholly cynical: Cinna crowns himself supreme ruler, unmistakably invoking Napoleon's self-coronation. The allusion cuts deep — Jacques-Louis David originally conceived "The Coronation of Napoleon" with Napoleon crowning himself before revising the composition, and Spontini's opera premiered barely three years after the actual event. Ancient Rome, Napoleonic Paris and mid-20th-century history suddenly collapse into one.

The Staatsopernchor, prepared by Dani Juris, functioned as crowd, congregation and political organism, demonstrating how readily collective ritual turns into collective intimidation.

Rizzi Finds Spontini's Italianità

At the podium, Carlo Rizzi resisted any temptation to make Spontini sound like proto-Wagner. He emphasized the score's italianità — its rhythmic propulsion, long vocal lines and instinct for theatrical momentum — despite the French text. The Staatskapelle Berlin responded with warmth and flexibility, letting this transitional score, Classical in some of its architecture and already Romantic in emotional temperature, reveal its distinctive identity.

Then comes the supposed happy ending. Julia and Licinius are reunited; doors open, light pours in, the couple walks through it. Machine-gun fire erupts.

Steier's qualification is devastating: individuals may escape a regime, but the mechanisms that created it remain. Cinna assumes supreme power. Talis est ordo deorum no longer describes divine order at all — it describes the order men construct and then attribute to the gods when they need an excuse to preserve it.

Spontini provided a miracle. Steier answers with gunfire. The staging now anchors a season that will test how far the Linden's audience follows its director into such unflinching territory.