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The Merry Widow is Hanna Glawari. She has inherited a lot and can now live it up and make the salons of the Parisian upper class unsafe. If only it weren't for all her admirers who have their eyes on her fortune! Because now she sees the chance to marry her childhood sweetheart Danilo - but he of all people doesn't want to get the reputation of marrying out of greed.

Fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, the German diplomat Walter and his wife Lisa travel by ship from Europe to Brazil, where he is to take up a new position. Everything seems peaceful until Lisa unexpectedly notices a passenger on board who reminds her of Marta, a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she worked as a guard. Lisa never told her husband anything about this past, and repressed it as best she could. But now images of her own involvement and guilt break out; the sea voyage leads inexorably into her own abysses.

She is a woman whose excessive desires lead to her own extinction: The Theban princess Semele is to marry Prince Athamas at her father's request, but falls in love with the god Jupiter, who appears to her in human form. On her wedding day, Semele therefore willingly allows herself to be abducted into his realm. The love-struck Jupiter swears to his new lover that he will grant her every wish. His jealous wife Juno uses this promise for a devious intrigue: In the guise of Semele's sister Ino, she convinces Semele that she can achieve immortality if she sees Jupiter in his true, divine form. In this way, she tells Semele that she wants Jupiter, without revealing to her that the sight of a god is unbearable for a human being. Semele will burn in the face of the real Jupiter.

Nothing is more improbable than the love between Tristan and Isolde: In a fight, Tristan murders her fiancé, then lets her heal his own wounds without being recognized. Tristan soon returns to Isolde and asks for her hand in marriage: not for himself, but in the name of King Marke. But something seems to be smoldering between the two, irreconcilable, on the border between love and hate. When Isolde plans to kill herself and Tristan, Isolde's servant Brangäne exchanges the poison for a love potion - the moment of impending death becomes the birth of a love that transcends everything.

Time is very confusing for a theater mind. When you have been in the world for so long, you lose the feeling for it. But it seems to be very important to people and we hear that in the music too: many composers have written music about the seasons or times of day. Here you can listen to a clock ticking, hear the big tower clock striking there, or be reminded of an evening sky. The orchestra takes the young audience on a musical journey through time, where one thing is certain: in this children's concert, time certainly does not pass too slowly.

Around seven decades after the premiere of Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde", the Swiss composer Frank Martin set about retelling the same story - a bold undertaking given the enormous impact of Wagner's work. In any case, the pacifist Martin was not allowed to make any reference to Wagner's powerful Gesamtkunstwerk due to the Nazi rulers' appropriation of Wagner.

Around ten years before his opera "The Passenger", which is on the Lübeck Music Theatre's repertoire this season, Mieczysław Weinberg composed his brilliant violin concerto in 1959. Influences from the musical tradition of the Eastern Jewish diaspora, with which he had been familiar since his childhood in Poland, shape the melody and harmony of the work. It is conceived as a symphony in four movements and dedicated to the great Russian violinist Leonid Kogan. In Lübeck, the solo part will be played by a proven Weinberg interpreter, the award-winning violinist Benjamin Schmid.

Else Lasker-Schüler is considered a multi-talented artist. She not only wrote poems, dramas and prose, but also performed them in eccentric readings accompanied by music. In her life, she blurred the line between art and reality and stylized herself into fictional characters such as the "Prince of Thebes".

After Yaroslav Ivanenko's acclaimed version of Sergei Prokofiev's "Cinderella" in the last season, three choreographers will present new dance pieces to the Lübeck audience in "The Fleeting Moment" in 2024/25, once again celebrating the immense richness of the dance scene.