Two days of creation – Newspaper Kommersant No. 140 (7341) of 08/04/2022

The 160th action took place at Prinzendorf Castle in Lower Austria – the first performance of Hermann Nitsch’s Six Day Play (1938-2022) in the absence of its creator, who died this spring. They showed only the first two “days” from “The Six-Day Play” – partly because of the covid, which prevented the production of a new version of the artist’s main work last summer, while the author was still alive. The remaining “days” are promised to be presented next year and beyond. The creation of the world in a reduced form was observed Anna Tolstova.

Nitsch staged The Valkyrie in Bayreuth last summer, but the Prinzendorf production of The Six-Day Play had to be canceled: Nitschev’s Orgy and Mystery Theater viewers don’t need a protective mask, because they have to breathe in the incense that the audience is constantly fumigating and participate in an endless meal, washing down dishes prepared according to traditional Austrian recipes with wine from their own Prinzendorf production, and the most daring are offered to partake of bull’s blood. Both the menu and the olfactory compositions are painted in detail in the multi-page score of the “Six Day Play”, the very real Gesamtkunstwerk that touches all human feelings, in terms of the totality of synesthesia, even surpasses the Wagnerian “synthetic work of art”. Nitsch called Prinzendorf, the baroque castle of the first third of the 18th century – the manor house with services, a moat, a bridge, a shady alley running through a park, gardens, fields, vineyards – his Bayreuth. The artist’s widow, Rita Nitsch, claims that in recent years it has been music that has come to the fore in the artist’s work, but whether the heirs will be able to turn Prinzendorf into a family business like Wagner’s is an open question.

In the posthumous edition of The Six Day Play, the music really set the rhythm for the whole action. As the sound of a large symphony orchestra grew, the ringing of church bells and the roar of synthesizers (an endlessly lasting chord and an endless crescendo are the main expressive means of the composer Nitsch, these fortissimos are indicated in the notes by multi-colored fills), the dramatic tension of the action intensified, and the participants entered into rage. On the crucified extras, naked or dressed in something like a Catholic alba, streams of wine, milk and blood brought from the surrounding slaughterhouses poured. Pounds of bloody tripe mixed with grapes and tomatoes fell out on the crucified pig carcasses, previously skinned and opened the belly like a wound. In gigantic troughs filled with grapes and tomatoes, dozens of crushers performed ritual dances. And hovering above all this liturgical bacchanalia, elevated to the captain’s bridge, was conductor Andrea Cusumano, who had worked with Nitsch since the first performance of The Six Day Play in 1998. Other old associates of the deceased were also responsible for the authenticity of the performance: Nitsch’s adopted son Leonhard Kopp, who participated in actions from his youth; Nitsch’s personal assistant and right-hand man, Frank Gassner; founder of the Neapolitan Nitch Museum Pepe Morra, true friend and fellow traveler Paul Renner, an artist who played the role of a chef. And among the extras there were those who have been participating in Nitchev’s actions since the mid-1970s. The absence of the director of the performance was all the more felt: in the middle of the courtyard of the castle there is an empty pool – its bottom and walls still keep traces of paint left over from Nitsch’s “picturesque actions”.

The castle has been owned by the artist since 1971 – the estate was bought for her husband, from his youth obsessed with the idea of ​​staging a play about the six days of creation, about being, space and the history of the human soul, about death and resurrection, about Christ and Dionysus, Nitsch’s second wife, Beate Koenig, soon died in a car accident. Preparations for the first production of The Six Day Play took almost 30 years – pictures from the premiere and other actions can be seen in the main chambers of the castle, turned into a home museum. The inner courtyard, an ideal resonator box for Nitsch’s minimalist music, became the main stage of the “Orgy and Mystery Theatre”: the musical and dramatic episodes of the ritual are repeated here with slight variations from dawn to dusk, but one day the procession with a bloodied crucified extra leaves the estate to cross field and find yourself on a neighboring village street with wine cellars, where everyone indulges in libations together. Nitsch was born in Vienna, but grew up in Prinzendorf – the atmosphere of Weinviertel, the wine region of Lower Austria, where Catholicism and Dionysianism are combined in the most organic way, fills his compositions. Mysticism and alchemy, cosmology and color theory, medicine and the church, minimalism and informal – from the spirit of this music, the tragedy of painting is born, which does not want to die. Looking at the troughs of green grapes and blood-red tomatoes, we feel that the late artist, who once intended to take up religious painting, sends us his last coloristic greetings.

The first production of The Six-Day Play in 1998 caused a storm of indignation – believers and non-believers, ultra-right and ultra-left, animal rights activists and haters of guest workers protested, who found among the participants in the action migrants without a work permit in Austria. Today, the protests have come to naught: someone listlessly reproached the organizers of the 160th action for the fact that food is being wasted, while half the Earth is starving, and one more local rooster tried all day to shout over this inhuman music, but in vain. However, scandals, lawsuits and furious debates in the press haunted Nitsch and other Viennese actionists since the early 1960s, and half a century later, the meaning of their provocative artistic strategy becomes clear: in public discussions, like in a purifying fire, those values ​​​​of the German spirit were tested, that were appropriated by the Nazi ideology – after all the ordeals, Nitsch could turn to the legacy of Wagner, Nietzsche and Grunewald, without fear of accusations that he worships Hitler’s idols. Skeptics thought the actionist scandals were just a publicity stunt. It turned out that the 160 actions, each of which ultimately raised the issue of freedom, were the work of denazification and healing from the traumas of totalitarianism.