Costume Designer

Set Designer

There are few operas, which from the very first bar endure such intense pressure, few in which the temperature swings from ice-cold calculation to overheating in mere seconds. And scarcely any in which private entanglement and personal tragedy are so interwoven with political attitudes in historical accuracy. Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca has electrified audiences since its world premiere. The shock wave emitted by the opera was so strong that decades later many reactions still tend to point to the bewilderment and overpowering of those affected rather than the qualities of the piece itself and its love triangle surrounding the singer Floria Tosca, the painter Mario Cavaradossi and the chief of police Baron Scarpia. The artistic world of the protagonist couple, Tosca and Cavaradossi, is no colouristic ingredient here, but rather defines the profile of its characters – it justifies Tosca’s eccentricity, just as it does Cavaradossi’s liberality and also explains the singer’s pronounced self-confidence: The heroine of the stage becomes a heroine in real life. Scarpia’s appearance must also be understood as the emergence of his unleashed totalitarian power, and his sexual sadism still today as one of the truly scandalous moments of opera literature. The historical detail is certainly no staffage, but rather forms the, “precondition of the conflict between the representatives of two opposing social systems” (Norbert Christen) in a time of crisis. With his mish-mash of musical recognition motifs, which, with the exception of the rigid Scarpia chords, sensitively adjust to the situations, Puccini achieves a new dimension of through-composed operatic structure – in the intensive cohesion of the score, he nevertheless creates islands in which reflection compacts itself into moments of the highest possible arioso intensity.

TOSCA

Max-Joseph-Platz

Prince Bluebeard's Castle, a one-act opera to a libretto by Béla Balàzs was composed by Bartók in 1911 but not performed until seven years later, on 24 May 1918 at the Budapest Opera House. The libretto proposed by Balàzs retrieves the figure from the fairytale tradition of the ruthless Bluebeard to cast it in a symbolist frame in the wake of Debussy-Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Melisande. The opera, divided into nine scenes, has only two protagonists: Bluebeard and his wife Judith, who express themselves with a song, mainly recitative, based on pentatonic scales of Hungarian folk tradition. The action takes place in the prince's castle in medieval times. A prologue recited by a bard introduces the first scene describing Judith's resolve to follow her husband into his gloomy and mysterious castle. However, the woman wants to know Bluebeard's past and starts to open the castle's seven secret doors one after the other. With dismay she discovers sinister rooms and places stained with blood, a pivotal element of the opera associated by Bartók with the minor second chord, the most dissonant of all. On opening the seventh and final door, Judith fears to find the corpses of her previous murdered wives, but instead she sees three richly dressed, living women parading before her eyes. They are the women of morning, noon and evening who now belong only to the world of Bluebeard's memories. Judith, as the woman of the night, after being crowned and covered in jewels by her husband, will follow them forever into the seventh room, whose door closes, plunging the castle back into darkness.

Bluebeard's castle / La voix humaine

Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Theatre

For Elina Makropoulos, this dream becomes reality in an involuntary and paradoxical experience. Long ago, her alchemist father tested an elixir of life on her. Since then, she has traveled throughout Europe, constantly changing her identity and her lover. Now 337 years old, an opera singer known as Emilia Marty, she finds herself embroiled in an inheritance dispute. While her beauty and undiminished voice still captivate, her sole objective is to rediscover the formula for the elixir, whose effects are threatening to fade. But is eternal life truly an enviable destiny?

The Makropoulos Affair

Lille Opera

»When it’s out of necessity, anything is permissible, he says. Maybe you’re right, she says.« The place: Bergen, Norway. It’s cold. It’s raining. Asle and the heavily pregnant Alida wander around the coastal city. The young couple are turned away wherever they go. The likes of them are not welcome here. Each pause masks a further drift into a surreal psychological haze. Driven by desperation, they break into a stranger’s house. A series of mysterious encounters in which the past comes to life proves to be a disastrous race against time.

Costume Designer, Set Designer

Monika Pormale

Events

Past events

6 - 12 Apr, 2026

TOSCA · Bayerische Staatsoper

14 - 22 Mar, 2026

Bluebeard's castle / La voix humaine · Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

About

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