18 People Needed Medical Help After Watching This Wild German Opera

It’s hard to tell if the premier of an opera titled Sancta at Stuttgart’s State Opera in Germany was an abject failure or a rousing success after 18 audience members needed medical assistance. The production features live piercings, sexually explicit acts, and graphic portrayals of violence and nudity. Some people just can’t handle avant-garde operas featuring rollerskating nuns and rows of crucified bodies.

It should be noted that this is a new production of an opera that is just over 100 years old. Created by a guy named Paul Hindemith in 1922 under the original title Sancta Susanna, the opera tells the tale of a nunnery driven mad by sexual desire and repression. It was controversial then and apparently still is.

Audience members were warned well ahead of time that some of the opera’s content could be triggering. I guess folks just weren’t prepared for just how triggering it could be, because some of the acts reportedly depicted triggered nausea and fainting. The opera’s spokesperson, Sebastian Ebling, said that they’ve gotten a lot of flak on social media about the content of the stage production, but strangely they’ve had no complaints from people who’ve actually attended the performances. Some of the fainting audience members must’ve left some sterling reviews online once they were released after the hospital or something.

As you can imagine, this has caused a bit of a stir among religious folks in Germany, but you can tell even the most religious Germans have a pretty progressive, open-minded view of religion and the freedom to speak openly about its pitfalls. The city dean for the Stuttgart Catholic Church, Christian Hermes, said that he heard a lot of disturbing feedback about the opera’s content and said that it goes “beyond the limits of what is aesthetically and psychologically tolerable”—which is a fun way of saying “this shit sucks.” But ultimately, he said that he had “respect for the artistic radicalism” of the opera’s director, Florentina Holzinger. 

That’s refreshing. In America, that kind of freedom of expression would’ve led to a national emergency, a total psychological meltdown of every Fox News talking head, and bomb threats from ultrareligious wackos. That’s not to say that religious leaders in Germany have been silent on some of the things depicted in Sancta. They’re just not threatening to kill anybody over it.

Despite it all, the opera has been commercially successful and all of its remaining performances are sold out. When 18 people get whisked away to the hospital, you’re going to get more people who are there to see some of your fucked up shit. The entire horror movie industry is evidence of that.