Welcome to the 22/23 season
Music theatre is nourishment for the head, heart and senses - this is what Deutsche Oper Berlin has been synonymous with for more than 100 years. We look forward to seeing you in the new season 22/23!
Welcome
Premieres and highlights of the 22/23 season 
Premiere on 5 May 2023
Matthäus-Passion / St Matthew's Passion
Music by Johann Sebastian Bach; Conductor: Alessandro De Marchi; Director: Benedikt von Peter; With Joshua Ellicott, Padraic Rowan, Joel Allison, Michael Bachtadze, Dean Murphy, Siobhan Stagg, Annika Schlicht et al.
Premiere on 29 January 2023
Simon Boccanegra
Opera in a prelude and three acts by Giuseppe Verdi; Conductor: Jader Bignamini; Director: Vasily Barkhatov; With George Petean, Attilio Glaser, Liang Li, Maria Motolygina, Michael Bakhtadze et al.
Premiere on 25 November 2022
Fidelio
Opera in two acts by Ludwig van Beethoven. Conductor: Sir Donald Runnicles; Director: David Hermann; With Thomas Lehman, Jordan Shanahan, Robert Watson, Ingela Brimberg, Albert Pesendorfer et al.
Premiere on 18 March 2023
Arabella
Lyrical comedy in three acts by Richard Strauss; Conductor: Sir Donald Runnicles; Director: Tobias Kratzer; With Albert Pesendorfer, Doris Soffel, Sara Jakubiak [18 March] / Gabriela Scherer, Elena Tsallagova, Russel Braun, Robert Watson et al.
Premiere on 19 May 2023
Francesca da Rimini
Tragedia in four acts by Riccardo Zandonai; Conductor: Ivan Repusic; Director: Christof Loy; With Sara Jakubiak, Ivan Inverardi, Jonathan Tetelman, Charles Workman et al.
World Premiere on 9 June 2023
Il Teorema di Pasolini
Opera by Giorgio Battistelli; libretto by Giorgio Battistelli, freely adapted from the film of the same title by Pier Paolo Pasolini; musical direction: Daniel Cohen; staging: Dead Centre; With Ángeles Blancas Gulin, Davide Damiani, Monica Bacelli, Nikolay Borchev, Meechot Marrero, Andrei Danilov et al.![Hérodiade [concert version]](https://imgtoolkit.culturebase.org?quality=8&file=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.culturebase.org%2Fe%2F6%2F7%2F6%2Ff%2Fpic_1646667761_e676f0dadc7e87c8628215fa70a8909a.jpeg&do=cropOut&width=590&height=590 "Hérodiade [concert version]")
Premiere on 15 June
Hérodiade [concert version]
Opera in four acts by Jules Massenet; Conductor: Enrique Mazzola; With Etienne Dupuis, Clémentine Margaine, Nicole Car, Matthew Polenzani, Marko Mimica et al.
Our season book is out now
Discover which works are new in our repertoire: as staged new productions on the big stage, as concert performances or in our second venue Tischlerei, plus 29 repertoire works from Mozart to Langgaard, concerts, recitals and jazz. In addition, portraits, essays and much more.
Cheaper to the opera ... with the Deutsche Oper Card
If you have a Deutsche Oper Card, you have the opportunity to purchase tickets at special rates as early as 30 March. In addition, the Card entitles you to purchase up to two tickets per performance at a 25% discount for performances in price categories A, B, C, D, E and S (excluding third-party, Tischlerei and Foyer performances). The Deutsche Oper Card costs € 75.00 once and is valid for the 22/23 season.
Generational performances 22/23
Children and young people under 18 pay only € 10.00 in advance, pensioners and retirees € 25.00 and that regardless of the chosen seat.
Artificial Intelligence and a Real Feeling
With the help of artificial intelligence, the Deutsche Oper translates the transformative power of opera into a novel visual world. The campaign designed by Stan Hema takes viewers on journeys into their own experiences, asking questions of our time.Our video recommendations
Battistelli on Pasolini and Teorema
Bach: Matthäus-Passion
Strauss: Arabella
Verdi: Simon Boccanegra
Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio
Battistelli: Experimentum Mundi
Mingus: Epitaph
Turnage: Greek
video - 01:24 min.
Battistelli on Pasolini and Teorema
video - 00:47 min.
Bach: Matthäus-Passion
video - 02:32 min.
Strauss: Arabella
video - 02:16 min.
Verdi: Simon Boccanegra
video - 02:38 min.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio
video - 00:59 min.
Battistelli: Experimentum Mundi
video - 06:46 min.
Mingus: Epitaph
video - 01:44 min.
Turnage: Greek
Topics
FIDELIO, from 25 November 2022
No Wagner without Beethoven
»I refuse to accept boundaries between symphonic music and musical theatre. Every orchestra, every piece of music sings – whether there is a singer involved or not. Music breathes, the audience breathes with us, and I always try to make the orchestra sing. In his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven opened symphonic music to human voices, an epochal decision. FIDELIO is equally ground-breaking. It is the story of a liberation, one we have to keep telling as long as people suffer imprisonment. Not only in his music, but also in content, Beethoven is more topical than ever.«
ANTIKRIST - from 10 February 2023
Dancing at the door of doomsday
Right now, a hundred years later, there’s a lot of looking back to the Roaring Twenties. The mixture of political tension and uninhibited living for the minute seems to be palpable again today, especially as Berlin was at the epicentre of the decadent »dance on a volcano« feeling a century ago. Rued Langgaard‘s ANTIKRIST is an amazingly clear-eyed end-of-days fantasy from the 1920s, and if anything it has gained in relevance in our times. Experience Ersan Mondtag's production again in February, directed by Stephan Zilias and Hermann Bäumer (24 February).
ARABELLA, from 18 March 20223
Curtain up for another Richard Strauss
ARABELLA, INTERMEZZO and DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN, Strauss’ often underestimated middle operas directed from this season by Tobias Kratzer as a small cycle, are all about societies undergoing change, with consequences for identities, roles and relationships. They also illuminate matrimony, a rare subject on the opera stage ...
FRANCESCA DA RIMINI, from 19 May 2023
Sara Jakubiak's view of the world
First Heliane, then Francesca di Rimini – soprano Sara Jakubiak embodies courageous women at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Heliane is more memorable to her for her total, passionate abandonment to love than her full nudity on stage. To Jakubiak, exposure is more to do with vocal ability and truthfulness. Heliane and Francesca are role models for her in their uncompromising search for freedom: confronted with her own fears, these figures offer orientation, as they have chosen freedom.
MATTHÄUS-PASSION, from 5 May 2023
The little ones carry the cross
The MATTHÄUS-PASSION may be the most complex choral work ever written. The director Benedikt von Peter takes Johann Sebastian Bach’s megalomania a bit further: with three choruses and four orchestras, each with its own organ. There will be eight singers on stage, plus an amateur chorus. The director is known for productions with a strong current political focus, such as the growing political awareness of children and teenagers since Fridays for Future and the coronavirus pandemic. Thus, young persons aged eight to twelve will play the tale of Jesu passion and crucifixion. This enables the audience to draw connections between the classic and current issues, such as the climate crisis.
HÉRODIADE, from 15 June 2023
French Enchantment
The French mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine appears in Jules Massenet’s HÉRODIADE, the latest in a string of Parisian Grand Opéra of the 19th century she has presented at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, from Bizet’s CARMEN to Berlioz’ LA DAMNATION DE FAUST, Massenet’s DON QUICHOTTE and Meyerbeer’s LE PROPHÈTE. A proud ambassador for French opera in Paris, Margaine calls Massenet her favourite composer, his writing highly complex, but his melodies of enchanting simplicity and simple beauty: »To me, that is very French… a little bit lyrical, a little bit dramatic; the orchestra is large, the sound full and modern. Massenet is great opera – he should be played more often!«
IL TEOREMA DI PASOLINI, from 9 June 2023
The Maestro turns cinema into opera
Though he lives in Rome, Giorgio Battistelli’s work as a composer has long been bound up with musical life in Germany. Since his first visits in 1975 to study with Stockhausen and Kagel and a year in West Berlin in 1985, he has considered Germany is his “artistic homeland”. The former artistic director of Rome’s Opera and the Venice Biennial is artistic director of the Haydn Orchestra in Bolzano and Trento today. Yet “I have to return to Germany at regular intervals, otherwise I feel a sense of loss,” he declares. “To me, it is the most democratic country in the field of operatic music, because avant-garde and tradition coexist here.” This is the case at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where Battistelli’s opera IL TEOREMA DI PASOLINI will now be performed. It commemorates the Italian director and author Pier Paolo Pasolini during the centenary of his birth. The figure of the mysterious guest in Pasolini’s TEOREMA – an exterminating angel, as Pasolini himself once suggested to Battistelli – has fascinated the composer for decades, and his opera examines family ties and how we treat that which is foreign to us.
The Tischlerei
is a laboratory for the music theatre of our time, an experimental field for new sounds and current themes, contemporary forms and changing perspectives. The productions of this season deal with female realities, question the transcendental power of theatre and illustrate the insurmountable fronts and human costs of war.
3, 5, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16 March 2023
World premiere – Karaoper
What if we could change the world? A future with fun, with clean seas and crystal clear blue skies, a world where justice prevails, where we can still travel and be with others from other countries ...? In the specially invented KARAOPER we want to dream together with children.
21, 22, 24, 27 April 2023
World premiere – New Scenes VI
The NEUE SZENEN competition was and is intended as an opportunity for young composers to gain experience in the complex metier of music theatre and to find a way to their own individual music-dramatic language. The three winners will be given the opportunity to write a music theatre piece of approximately thirty minutes in length - performed by students of the Hanns Eisler Academy, who will also have the opportunity to gain experience in the field of contemporary opera. From a total of 119 entries, the jury had to choose the three winners for the sixth series: Sina Fani Sani (Iran), Germán Alonso (Spain) and Juta Pranulyté (Lithuania).
21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30 June; 1 July 2023
World premiere – Bär*in
The multi-perspective evening by composer Arne Gieshoff and director Franziska Angerer combines Nastassja Martin's story "Croire aux fauves" (Believing in the Wild) and Berlin's urban history from the bears' point of view into a dense compositional web. BÄR*IN is a hybrid evening about metamorphoses and an invitation to consider our world as a structure in which not only humans are active agents.
BÄR*IN, first performance on 21 June 2023
Of bears, humans and intermediates
Inspired by Nastassja Martin’s autobiographical novel »In the Eye of the Wild«, which describes how the author survived an encounter with a bear in Siberia almost by miracle, and by the story of Berlin’s heraldic animal and the questionable practice of keeping three bears in a kennel in Berlin until 2015, the director Franziska Angerer and the composer Arne Gieshoff have devised a musical theatre work about identity, power, the assignment of roles, and the (fluid) distinctions between human and animal.
NEGAR, World premiere on 29 October 2022
Love and fear in a world of the dictatorship
Starting with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, NEGAR examines what happens when you turn around and return to your past. How do you shape your identity in a place full of prohibitions? Do you need others to become yourself? Signeyrole’s work resembles journalistic research, a mix of documentary and fiction, although the story itself is fictional. ... Keyvan Chemirani has extensively worked with jazz and baroque musicians, but writing for lyrical voices in NEGAR was a welcome challenge.
29, 30 Oct; 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 Nov 2022
