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Schedule - Deutsche Oper Berlin

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Giuseppe Verdi in May

With audio description

Aida

Giuseppe Verdi [1813 – 1901]

22
Thursday
May
19:30 - 22:45
C prices: € 108.00 / 90.00 / 64.00 / 40.00 / 26.00
Buy tickets
Modified seating plan [members of chorus and orchestra will be seated amongst the audience]
Information about the work

Opera lirica in four acts
Libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni based on a draft by Auguste Mariette, developed by Camille Du Locle in collaboration with Giuseppe Verdi
World premiere 24th December 1871 in Cairo
Premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, 22nd November 2015

3 hrs 15 mins / 1 interval

In Italian language with German and English surtitles

Pre-performance lecture (in German): 45 minutes prior to each performance

recommended from 15 years on
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Cast
Our thanks to our partners

Kindly supported by Förderkreis der Deutschen Oper Berlin e. V.

22
Thursday
May
19:30 - 22:45
C prices: € 108.00 / 90.00 / 64.00 / 40.00 / 26.00
Buy tickets
Modified seating plan [members of chorus and orchestra will be seated amongst the audience]
Cast
the content

About the work
“Amore, sommissione, dolcezza” – the traits that Giuseppe Verdi gave his eponymous heroine, Aida, who embodies pure love, tenderness and submissiveness. And these characteristics put her firmly in the tradition of 19th-century female protagonists who were not so much fully rounded personalities as sex objects and a focus for male fantasies, women whose inevitable fate was to die of a broken heart. And Aida is no different.

But in a departure from Verdi’s earlier operas AIDA offers a different model to that of the doomed love affair, and it comes in the form of Amneris, whom Verdi describes as “molto vivacità” in his list of protagonists. Amneris seethes with life energy, aggressively defending her love. She is a woman who could hold down a relationship.

Radames, on the other hand, the man caught between Aida and Amneris, cannot commit to the real world. He builds Aida up in his mind, transfixed by the aloof, “exotic” woman. In love with his image of an angelic figure, Radames dreams of struggling heroically against misery and repression. Radames stages his heroic acts in the full glare of publicity, while wincing at his own failure to reconcile utopic love with a political utopia - because the object of his desire is doomed anyway and the rescue of POWs and the downtrodden is not only futile but also linked to the use of violence.

So, we have an unrealistic hero, plagued by his own angst, as the linchpin of an opera that is arguably Giuseppe Verdi’s most pessimistic, ending as it does with Radames abdicating from life and withdrawing into a granite mausoleum. Aida’s death also represents the end of the utopia.


About the production
With this in mind, director Benedikt von Peter sees Verdi’s grand opéra as a “requiem to utopia”, a work that never escapes the gaze of the public, and the action of his AIDA extends to all corners of the auditorium. As in other productions of his, von Peter opens up the opera house’s musical architecture, spreading it the length and breadth of the auditorium. It’s a musical structure that ranges from full-throated choruses of a nation at war to the fragile theme of the work: the loneliness of Radames, Amneris and Aida. The three protagonists act and react on the proscenium flanked by two corpuses: the orchestra on the main stage and the opera chorus placed amongst the audience. The public, then, sitting in the midst of the music, are getting a close-up experience of Verdi’s score.

Our recommendations

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08
DEC

Adventsverlosung: Das 8. Fensterchen

We are already looking forward to the revival of Rued Langgaard's ANTIKRIST in April 2025, a production that is both musically exuberant and scenically imaginative.

Today, we are giving away two DVDs of this production in Ersan Mondtag's staging in our Advent calendar. If you would like to take part in the draw, please send an e-mail to advent@deutscheoperberlin.de today with the subject line ‘The 8th window’.

The Antichrist makes his entrance into a godless world. Sent by Lucifer into the world, he adopts many guises. Mankind is tested and tempted by pride, lust, lies, despondency and hatred in an “all-against-all altercation”. Langgaard’s opera is suffused with fin de siècle atmosphere and pessimism, warning of catastrophe and denouncing the vices of the modern age: egotism, arrogance, frivolity. Langgaard, though, was also an optimist, convinced of the transformative, transcendental power of art and the importance of music as a thread connecting people to the godhead. So it is that the world is freed of all evil and sorrow in the culminating chorus scene in ANTIKRIST. In the eyes of multi-award-winning director Ersan Mondtag, Langgaard’s opera foretelling a doomsday frenzy is a parable of our own times.

Under the baton of Stephan Zilias, this award-winning production by Ersan Mondtag features Thomas Lehman, Jonas Grundner-Culemann, Valeriia Savinskaia, Irene Roberts, Clemens Bieber, Maire Therese Carmack, Flurina Stucki, AJ Glueckert, Andrew Dickinson, Joel Allison, as well as the chorus and orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. The performances on 10 and 12 February 2023 were recorded for this DVD. This DVD was awarded the ‘Diamant d'Opéra’ by ‘Opéra Magazine’ in December 2024.

We would like to thank the Naxos label for the great collaboration over the past few years, which includes recordings of DER ZWERG, DAS WUNDER DER HELIANE, FRANCESCA DA RIMINI, DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN, DER SCHATZGRÄBER, DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG and ANTIKRIST. Richard Strauss' ARABELLA and INTERMEZZO will be released in the course of 2025.



Closing date: 8 December 2024. The winners will be informed by email on 9 December 2024. The DVDs will then be sent by post. There is no right of appeal.