Militant Islam Monitor > Articles > In Harm's Way,German Opera Company Cancels Idomeneo Over Fear of Offending Muslims
In Harm's Way,German Opera Company Cancels Idomeneo Over Fear of Offending Muslims
September 28, 2006
In Harms' Way, German Opera Company Cancels Idomeneo Over Fear Of Offending Muslims
http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=idomeneo92806%2Ehtm
In Harms' Way, German Opera Company Cancels Idomeneo Over Fear Of Offending Muslims
http://www.pipelinenews.org/index.cfm?page=idomeneo92806%2Ehtm
September 28, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Proving that intellectual discourse in Europe is dead by its own hand, Kirsten Harms, the director of Berlin's Deutsche Oper has cancelled what has become a controversial production of Mozart's opera Idomeneo.
The opera is set in Crete at the time of the Trojan war and centers upon the relationship between the gods of the time and man.
In the halted production, the concluding act of the opera - originally king Idomeneo declaring peace - was modified [appalingly] by director Hans Neuenfels to instead depict Idomeneo placing the bloody severed heads of Poseidon, Buddha, Jesus Chris and Mohammed on display, a move designed to extend Nietzsche's theme of God is dead to one of "man has killed God."
There are at least three stories here.
The first is one of Europe's willingness to place itself in an intellectual straightjacket rather than possibly offend a growing and aggressive Islamist minority linked to numerous acts of terrorism.
The moral capitulation in evidence here reeks, and is displayed nearly every day in Europe's mad headlong rush to oblivion.
The second is the post modernist requirement to reflexively demean religion in the name of art. If the reference here to Islam had not been included there would simply be no controversy whatsoever.
The third angle working here is one of moral relativism, placing Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and pagan Greek beliefs all on the same moral plane, albeit a rather low one. Of course one can't reasonably expect Germany's nihilistic dominant culture to make value judgment's regarding competing ethical systems.
While this may seem a minor controversy to some, it is in abstraction wholly illustrative of the rot eating at the West - alluded to by Pope Benedicts in his University of Regensburg address - and why radical Islam looms as such a threat.
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