With audio description

Aida

Giuseppe Verdi [1813 – 1901]

28
Sunday
January
17:00 - 20:15
B-Prices: € 86,00 / € 66,00 / € 44,00 / € 26,00 / € 20,00
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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Kindly supported by Förderkreis der Deutschen Oper Berlin e. V.

28
Sunday
January
17:00 - 20:15
B-Prices: € 86,00 / € 66,00 / € 44,00 / € 26,00 / € 20,00
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.

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02
DEC

Advents-Verlosung: Das 2. Fensterchen

In today's Advent calendar window, we are giving away 3 DVDs of "Der Schatzgräber" - an opera in a prelude, four acts and a postlude by Franz Schreker. If you would like to win one of the three DVDs, please send an e-mail today with the subject "The 2nd window" to advent@deutscheoperberlin.de.

DER SCHATZGRÄBER (THE TREASURE HUNTER) by Franz Schreker was a triumph at its world premiere in Frankfurt in 1920 and went on to play 44 times at assorted venues over the next five years. It then fell victim to a shifting zeitgeist and slipped from opera-house programmes, with a National Socialist ban on performances sealing its demise. Even after 1945 the Schreker revival was a long time coming – and THE TREASURE HUNTER has not featured prominently in the renaissance.

As with the vast majority of Schreker’s libretti, the story of Els and Elis explores the relationship between fantasy and reality, between art and life. Soulmates in the sense that they are both at the mercy of the king’s disposition, Els and Elis set off in search of different treasures. Elis, the minstrel, uses his magic lute to locate a stash of jewels and do humanity a good turn. Els, an innkeeper’s daughter who has grown up motherless in a tough, male-chauvinist world, becomes a liar, cheat and murderess in pursuit of her goal, tasking her suitors to steal the queen’s jewels and then having them killed once they have returned with the haul of treasure. Yet even with the gold in their possession, the pair are not content, and so, true to form, Schreker turns his attention to the theme of yearning per se, which is the actual “treasure” that the composer is interested in, “a dream of happiness and redemption”. Elis and Els are caught up in a swirl of dreams, memories, premonitions, songs and music. Their stories take on a dreamlike quality in a world beset by greed, murder and emotional inconstancy. For Franz Schreker the path to redemption could only be via art. Composed during the turmoil of the First World War, the TREASURE HUNTER score amounts to Schreker’s personal confession of artistic faith, executed in florid strokes of late-Romantic musical colour.

Conductor Marc Albrecht; Staging Christof Loy; Set design Johannes Leiacker; Costume design Barbara Drosihn; With Tuomas Pursio, Doke Pauwels, Clemens Bieber, Michael Adams, Joel Allison, Michael Laurenz, Thomas Johannes Mayer, Seth Carico, Daniel Johansson, Gideon Poppe, Stephen Bronk, Elisabet Strid, Patrick Cook, Tyler Zimmerman a. o.; Chorus and Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin



Closing date: 2 December 2023, the winners will be informed by email on 4 December 2023. The DVDs will then be sent by post. Legal recourse is excluded.