Rusalka is not a happily tragic fairy tale. Rusalka’s lake is a dark, damp cellar, where she is imprisoned with her sisters by her abusive father. But once she finally escapes, she is thrown mute and alone into an equally brutal world where she is utterly unequipped to survive, and he...
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.
Salzburg Festival’s first-ever performance of Charles Gounod´s most famous and most performed opera! Internationally-acclaimed tenor Piotr Beczala triumphs in the title role as soul-selling philosopher Faust: “Piotr Beczala is a world-Faust” (Kurier) and “The well-deserved crown goes to a...
Comic romance with a philosophical twist? This popular opera combines it all to tell the story of a revoltingly greedy man who tries to get his hands on a young woman's fortune.
Two Queens. One Catholic and Scottish, one Protestant and English. One in prison at the other’s behest. A man between them balancing loyalty and love. A cry of ‘Vile bastard’ is the impassioned insult that leads one to the scaffold. The insult was so potent that the first performance of...
A kind-hearted young woman is forced to be a maid in her own home. Her luck seems to turn when a royal bachelor comes looking for a wife, but her stepsisters are determined to keep her in her place. Give your New Year a fairytale start with Rossini’s La Cenerentola. Directed by Orpha Phelan,...
