Forbidden love, wrongdoings and anguish: the Opernhaus Zürich ventures into late nineteenth-century French romanticism with Werther by Jules Massenet. A loose adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethes epistolary novel 'The Sorrows of Young Werther', the opera is conducted by Germanys Cornelius...
Faust, an aged philosopher and magician who has grown weary of life and has sought in vain for the secret of eternal youth, decides, after a night's long vigil, to call forth from the realms of darkness the evil one to aid him. Mephistopheles appears and offers him his services in return for...
The director, Roland Schwab, has created his version of Hell. The set is like a high iron walled hanger and the stage is continually occupied with people who look like fugitives from Mad Max and who interact with Mefistofele. The orchestra and choir are wonderful. Rene Pape gives a nuanced...
This animated short is a visual representation of Goethe's poem, The ErlKing that uses sand-on-glass animation set to the music of Franz Schubert. The moving images, resembling woodcuts, capture the haunting, nightmarish quality of the tale of the ErlKing who steals and kills a little boy.
While cycling through a dark forest at night, a young boy is visited by der Erlkönig, a harbinger of death. He asks for his father to save him but the father can't see the Erlkönig and there is nothing to stop the approach of death.
Riding outside, the princess and the court juggler Honorio discover a fire in the marketplace. Honorio kills a tiger that has escaped from the jugglers, a lion is tamed by a boy's wonderful flute playing and returned to the jugglers, whose livelihood it provides.
Radiant mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and dashing Italian tenor Marcello Giordani are unlucky lovers in La Damnation de Faust, Hector Berlioz’s classic take on dancing with the devil.
Faust, an old, bright but desperate man, struggles with the sense of his life. After trying all kinds of sciences he enters into a contract with the devil, Mephistopheles, to feel life, joy and desire again. Mephistopheles promises him to get full satisfaction by enjoying and celebrating all the...
The soundtrack is taken from "Schubert Year by Year", released on Stone Records in preparation for the 2014 Oxford Lieder Festival, "The Schubert Project", and the film was created by Jeremy Hamway-Bidgood. Music by Franz Schubert. Poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
