Peter Konwitschny's new production on the première stage in Munich gives it a new, optimistic interpretation. At the opening of the Munich Opera Festival 1998, Tristan und Isolde was staged in what is now the ninth new production at the Bavarian State Opera since its world première. Director...
The first ever performances in Munich, this production was entrusted to Dmitri Tcherniakov, whose worldwide reputation is underpinned by productions like Eugene Onegin and Macbeth at the Paris Opera and Don Giovanni at Aix-en- Provence. The superb international cast includes a fine Blanche de la...
Christian Thielemann conducts this Staatskapelle Dresden production of Richard Strauss' chamber opera. The opera follows events at the home of the wealthiest man in Vienna, who has booked both a comedy burlesque act and a serious opera group for entertainment. When the dinner runs long he declares...
Sergei S. Prokofiev's monumental setting of Leo N. Tolstoy's epic novel, War and Peace. The composer and his wife Mira compressed the plot, set during Napoleon's Russian campaign, into a powerful sequence of scenes in which the love story between Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky and the...
The Snow Queen is Hans Abrahamsen's first opera, composed to a self-penned libretto, based on Hans Christian Andersen's eponymous fairy tale. Following an in-depth study of the topic of snow and a life-long obsession with Andersen's fairy tales, Abrahamsen composed the opera between 2014 and 2018....
Stage director Frank Castorf “might have been born to direct From the House of the Dead” (Opera Today). His gritty, visually striking adaptation brings bold modern and postmodern touches to Janáček’s masterwork without ever overshadowing the intense forward momentum of the music, conducted...
Requiring 38 soloists, chorus, and large orchestra, Hans Pfitzner's "Palestrina" is a challenging opera to stage. In Munich, the city in which it was premiered in 1917, director Christian Stückle, conductor Simone Young, and the Bavarian State Opera met those challenges with stunning success.
The revolutionary tribunal has sentenced Andrea Chénier to death and no one can avert his fate. Shortly before his execution, Chénier is visited by his lover Maddalena, who has decided to die at the poet's side. “Our death is the triumph of love”, the lovers promise each other in their last...
A couple and their hallucinatory journey to the dark side of passion. Renata is driven by a longing for the consummate sexual encounter. Since her youth she has had a vision of an ecstatic conjugation with a shining angel. Ruprecht falls for Renata and follows her unreservedly on her obsessive...
A brilliant performance of Schönberg's monumental work at the Prague State Opera. Arnold Schönberg composed Gurre-Lieder to a text by J. P. Jacobsen about the tragic love of the Danish king Waldemar and his mistress Tove Lille, who was murdered out of jealousy by Queen Helviga. He orchestrated...
Barrie Kosky gives the “operetta of all operettas” a new look and devotes himself to its morbid side. The setting is Vienna, city of the golden operetta era, where Die Fledermaus premiered at the Theater an der Wien in 1874. The bat's revenge becomes a nightmare, and not just for Gabriel von...
