Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

CULTURE

Vienna State Opera cancels all shows to January 6th due to Omicron

The Vienna State Opera has cancelled all performances up to and including January 5th, 2022 due to several cases of Omicron among staff and performers and the resulting number of contacts needing to quarantine.

Published: 1 January 2022 17:57 CET

An usher waits for guests prior to a concert at Vienna's State Opera in Vienna, Austria

Excluding lockdowns, Vienna's State Opera has not cancelled a single performance since the pandemic began. JOE KLAMAR / AFP

The first affected performance is the 6.30pm show of Strauss’ Die Fledermaus on January 1st.

“We will do all we can to resume performances on January 6th, said State Opera director Bogdan Rošcic, Standard reported.

“The State Opera has been battling with Covid-19 for almost two years and outside of lockdowns, has not cancelled a single performance to date,” Rošcic said, explaining that the situation had become increasingly difficult over the last few weeks.

More than 85 percent of the opera company have had three vaccinations against Covid-19 and they also take PCR tests at least three times a week.

“But the working conditions, especially among the artists, playing, singing, dancing and playing music together, make complete protection impossible,” the director said.

The highly contagious Omicron variant had led to a dramatic increase in infection rates and the company now hoped that by having a break and toughening up safety measures, they would be able to resume performances in a few days’ time, Rošcic said, apologising to all visitors for the inconvenience.

All tickets would be refunded, the State Opera said.

People who have been in contact with someone who tests positive for Omicron are considered Category 1 (K1) contacts. This means that even vaccinated people who have been in contact with a person infected with Omicron need to self-isolate for ten days, although they can take a PCR test to end the quarantine early after five days if they test negative.

Contacts of people with previous variants are considered Category 2 (K2) and do not have to self-isolate

On Saturday, Austria reported 3,608 new Covid-19 infections and 16 Covid-related deaths.

READ ALSO:

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Austrian artist turns Hitler manifesto into cookbook

In a cafe in the Nazi leader’s native Austria, an artist is cutting up the book that laid the ideological foundations for Nazism — “My Struggle” — letter by letter and reforming them into recipes.

The sentences are mashed and re-served as instructions for making pizza, asparagus salad, tiramisu and egg dumplings — said to have been Hitler’s favourite dish.

Artist Andreas Joska-Sutanto has been working at it for eight years and has so far finished cutting up about a quarter of the book after almost 900 hours of painstaking work.

“I want to show… that you can turn something negative into something positive by deconstructing and rearranging it,” the 44-year-old graphic designer told AFP in the Viennese cafe, where he can be observed once a week working for a few hours.

– ‘Poisonous words’ –

First published in two tomes in 1925 and 1926, Hitler’s autobiographical “My Struggle” served as a manifesto for National Socialism and the ensuing wave of racial hatred, violence and anti-Semitism that engulfed Europe.

The book entered the public domain in 2016 when its copyright lapsed.

Once it became available, Joska-Sutanto came up with the idea of meticulously cutting out every single letter of the 800-page text — with an estimated total of 1.57 million letters — to rearrange them into cooking recipes.

He glues the pages onto adhesive film before dissecting them.

So far, his cookbook draft has 22 recipes.

The original text “no longer has any weight”, he said, displaying the remains of the gutted copy of the book.

“All the weight in the form of letters is gone.”

He left the Nazi dictator’s portrait in the book untouched, he said, to show that “without his poisonous words”, Hitler was reduced to staring at the void.

‘Irreverent’ artwork

Reactions to the project have been mostly positive, Joska-Sutanto said, though he once apologised to a spectator who criticised his work as “extremely irreverent”.

At the cafe, owner Michael Westerkam, 33, praised the project — he said the raising of awareness of difficult topics such as a country’s historical past could be achieved “in many ways”.

Experts consulted by AFP were reluctant to speak on the record about the project. One, who asked not to be named, said there was a view that it was a “strange” initiative and of “limited” historical and artistic relevance.

Austria long cast itself as a victim after being annexed by the German Third Reich in 1938. It is only in the past three decades that it has begun to seriously examine its role in the Holocaust.

Joska-Sutanto estimates that it will take him 24 more years to finish his project.

Url copied to clipboard!