29,313; or, where the archive ends

“Before we go any further, you should know that what I’m about to do is an evasive maneuver of critical privilege: I’m going to temporarily bracket the real world and the ongoing suffering in it. Which means bracketing the death of 29,313 Palestinians and counting, the senseless expenditure of civilian life by terrorist regimes, the decades-long complexities of international warfare, and the ongoing censorship of pro-Palestinian voices across Germany. As a result, I will not be making any direct claims for or against the political empathy the staging pressures onto its audience. That would be the obvious riposte. It would be easy to dismiss the production on ideology alone, to criticize the audacity of a blatantly pro-Israeli staging, but this would also be submitting to its logic. Wiegand hopes that we will get caught up in social moralizing and forget to notice the opera, which is all the while saying something very different. So instead, I want to briefly take the production at its word.”