Newsletter

News about the schedule Personal recommendations Special offers ... Stay well informed!

Subscribe to our newsletter

Subscribe to our Newsletter and receive 25% off your next ticket purchase.

* Mandatory field





Newsletter

When violence makes a man sexy - Deutsche Oper Berlin

When violence makes a man sexy

In A FLORENTINE TRAGEDY it’s the survival of the fittest. And anything goes – including murder. And the girl? She thinks it’s great. Conductor Marc Albrecht peers into the abyss

The world is teetering on the brink and at the same time hurtling into the modern age – and the hectic evolution of music in the years between 1905 and 1920 mirrors it all. The music of the period is unique: insistent, omnipresent and nudging the extremes. And all its strands meet in Vienna. 

Alexander von Zemlinsky, Alban Berg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold are at home in this Viennese society. Although they are of different generations, they are kindred spirits, teacher and student, corresponding with each other, hosting soirées, performing their pieces and critiquing the works of their colleagues.

The three men reflect the plurality of the era. Korngold is bubbly, cheeky and ironic, his »Much Ado About Nothing« almost popular in tone. At the opposite end of the scale is the soberly sensuous sound of Berg’s »Seven Early Songs«. And Zemlinsky has created a world-class work in the form of his A FLORENTINE TRAGEDY, arguably the darkest in the history of opera.

These works are works of agony reflecting the First World War, the all-pervading disaster of those years. The dip in population, too, is mirrored in the music: Korngold downsizes his musical version of the Shakespeare play to take account of the drop in the number of musicians available; Zemlinsky duplicates many of his instruments in his score to ensure a roundness of volume, even if he’s short of musicians.

The complex works of this period have a welter of sound written into their scores, which poses quite a challenge for me. Zemlinsky is hard to conduct; his orchestras number close to a hundred musicians, which can overwhelm the acoustics of a standard auditorium. What makes his music so fascinating to conduct is its colour and subtlety. When I read the score, I can hear every detail of the music in my head. You have to take decisions constantly. What’s the dynamic between the various voices? How to make complex tonal structures appear transparent? And if my decisions are to be put into practice, there has to be a musical dialogue going on at rehearsals.

The head-on brutality portrayed in A FLORENTINE TRAGEDY is already there in Oscar Wilde’s source text. While Simone the cloth merchant is away on business, Bianca, his wife, begins an affair with the young Guido. The unequal tussle between the two men is rendered in the music as well. Simone, a heroic baritone, prevails, accompanied by a wall of orchestral sound, and this power is a source of fascination to Bianca. Guido, her lover, is a tenorino, pretty of voice; he is not in Simone’s league, however, and is killed in the duel. After years of marital strife, the killing of Guido falls for her husband a second time.

I shudder at the seductive effect of such brutality – as if violence were an aphrodisiac, heightening lust through its very lethality. We’re looking into the abyss.

Enter Onepager
1

slide_title_1

slide_description_1

slide_headline_2
2

slide_title_2

slide_description_2

slide_headline_3
3

slide_title_3

slide_description_3

slide_headline_4
4

slide_title_4

slide_description_4

Create / edit OnePager
21
DEC

Advents-Verlosung: Das 21. Fensterchen

On 12 April 2025, we will celebrate the revival of DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG in the production by Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito and Anna Viebrock, with Thomas Johannes Mayer as Hans Sachs, Elena Tsallagova as Eva, Magnus Vigilius as Walther von Stolzing and Chance Jonas-O'Toole as David, as part of our ‘Richard Wagner in April’ weeks. But today, we are giving away our DVD, which was recorded in collaboration with the NAXOS label in the premiere series in early summer 2022.

In today's Advent calendar window, we are giving away 2 DVDs of DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG – Opera in three acts by Richard Wagner. If you would like to win one of the two DVDs, please write an e-mail with the subject ‘The 21st window’ to advent@deutscheoperberlin.de.

More popular than almost any other stage work by Richard Wagner, DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG is loved and hated at the same time. The play combines a light-hearted comedy plot with a summer night's drunken play about the delusion and reality of love, but at the same time claims to be a founding manifesto of German national art and is therefore more historically charged in its reception than almost any other work by Richard Wagner. At the same time, however, DIE MEISTERSINGER is first and foremost a piece about music and music-making.

Telling the story of DIE MEISTERSINGER in a world dedicated to music is also the starting point for the directorial concept of Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock and Sergio Morabito. In it, they tell of the rules and rigid dogmas that govern this world and which thus become an example for numerous contexts in which people set rules, subordinate themselves and find refuge in them or want to break out and escape. They bring a play to the stage in which singers also play singers in order to tell a story about singing. And they show characters such as Hans Sachs, an ageing man who renounces his love for Eva in favour of a younger man and at the same time wants to reform the system, but does not shy away from demagoguery and populism - while the breath of history occasionally blows in the ghosts of the Meistersinger past.

Conductor John Fiore; Staging Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock, Sergio Morabito; With Johan Reuter, Albert Pesendorfer, Gideon Poppe, Simon Pauly, Philipp Jekal, Thomas Lehman, Jörg Schörner, Clemens Bieber, Burkhard Ulrich, Stephen Bronk, Tobias Kehrer, Byung Gil Kim, Klaus Florian Vogt, Ya-Chung Huang, Heidi Stober, Annika Schlicht a. o.; Chorus and Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin



Closing date: 21 December 2024, the winners will be informed by email on 23 December 2024. The DVDs will then be sent by post. Legal recourse is excluded.