Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub
Text Jan Lauwers
Language: English
Performance exclusively for school classes. No regular tickets for sale.
Opera
from 16
Cast at
4. June 2025
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Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub
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In a world premiere, Jan Lauwers, Kate Lindsey and the Needcompany bring the life and world of one of the most remarkable female artists of the 20th century to the opera stage at NEST: Lee Miller.
The opera is a portrait of this woman who said at the end of her life that she felt like a cow that had been milked dry.
The American was a photographer, a top model in New York, a surrealist in Paris and a war correspondent for the US Army during the Second World War. She was a woman who stood in the shadow of many men. Famous men. Notorious men. So the portrait is no longer just that of Lee, but of so many women in the history of art who have been gagged.
Jan Lauwers wrote the text for Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub for the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, whom he met while working together on Monteverdi 's L'incoronazione di Poppea at the Vienna State Opera. His daughter, the actress Romy Louise Lauwers, had a decisive influence on the creation process of the work as the "first reader". Both women embody Lee Miller in the play, not in the sense of an exact biographical portrayal, but as representatives of many women in art history who were deliberately overlooked or silenced.
"The composition of the five-piece ensemble of percussion, strings, trombone and contrabassoon is driven by the search for the moment in which the autonomous instrument and its sound become corporeal and the instrumentalist becomes corporeality. it is slogging through the dirt, not floating above the clouds." (Jan Lauwers)
The American artist Lee Miller has long fascinated the Belgian theater maker Jan Lauwers as one of the strong female figures who have had a decisive influence on his work: Photographer, top model in New York, surrealist in Paris, war correspondent for the US Army during the Second World War. Lauwers describes Lee Miller as "a woman in the shadow of many men". Few people today know of her artistic collaboration with Man Ray, the pioneer of experimental photography; she is more likely to be remembered as the wife of British surrealist Roland Penrose or as a model for Pablo Picasso. However, one of her pictures is the most famous: "Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub", taken by Time-Life photographer David E. Scherman, with whom Miller worked closely. The two had documented the horrors of the concentration camp in Dachau and then traveled to Munich. Shortly after Hitler's suicide in Berlin on April 30, 1945, they entered his apartment on Munich's Prinzregentenplatz. The photo was taken there.
“The text,” says Jan Lauwers, “begins at the moment when Lee Miller is standing in front of Hitler's bathtub in her stinking clothes, which still smell of the corpse of Dachau.” Lauwers is interested in the ambiguity of Lee Miller's figure as a woman and artist in a patriarchal society. Some of her pictures are still known today - better known than their creator. After her marriage to Roland Penrose and the birth of her son, Miller hardly ever worked as a photographer. A post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from the events of the war is suspected to be behind her later alcoholism.