Long before the cinematic popularity of Downton Abbey or the Jane Austen craze, the ruthless inner world of the British landed gentry became the setting for Italian opera. With his 1835 setting of Walter Scott's successful novel The Bride of Lammermoor, Gaetano Donizetti created a lyrical drama that remains the epitome of Italian Romanticism. Set in Scotland around 1700, the tragedy is also the most famous example of the transformation of the virtuosic bel canto style into a highly expressive stylisation of extreme emotional states and contains what is arguably the most famous scene of madness in Italian opera. Filippo Sanjust’s production, with its painted scenery and spotlights, evokes the atmosphere of an operatic evening from the work’s original era. Michele Spotti, Principal Guest Conductor of Deutsche Oper Berlin, conducts the company’s ensembles for the first time in his new role. As Lucia we encounter the virtuoso Nina Minasyan, and one of the most brilliant bel canto tenors, Xabier Anduaga, returns to our stage as Edgardo.

Lucia di Lammermoor

Deutsche Oper Berlin

«What is our life? A game! Good and evil are merely dreams, work and honesty just lies,» Hermann fatalistically concludes in Pique Dame, as he faces his end at the gaming table. Based on Pushkin’s novella, Tchaikovsky paints a picture of a world dominated by economic inequality and the law that dictates only the strongest survive. Hermann must live up to the social standing of his lover Lisa at any cost; he hopes to gain wealth through the Countess’s cursed card secret. But his hope for happiness vanishes in a spiral of obsession that drags Hermann into the abyss. Doris Soffel returns as the Countess in Sam Brown’s production. Elena Guseva takes on the role of Lisa, while Arsen Soghomonyan makes his house debut as Hermann; both have performed the roles on stages from Milan to New York. Stéphane Degout and Alexey Markov, two great baritones of our time, appear as Prince Yeletsky and Count Tomsky, respectively. The musical direction is by the Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits.

Queen of Spades

Mozart’s singspiel The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) may at first glance appear fairytale-like and almost a bit naive. And the plot surrounding Konstanze, who has been abducted by pirates and is now trapped in the harem of Bassa Selim, seems to only confirm this. But Mozart’s music transcends the boundaries of the singspiel. It transforms the characters, who seem bound to the «Turkish opera» so popular in the 18th century but usually quite simplistic, into profoundly human characters exposed to extreme situations and experiencing conflicting emotions. For Mozart, the inner conflicts of his characters were more important than the external plot, and his music explores them in a psychologically profound way. The Argentinian-Spanish author and director Rodrigo García has transposed the story to the present day and rewritten the dialogue. With the French-British conductor Stephanie Childress, one of the most interesting young musicians of our time makes her debut at Deutsche Oper Berlin. In addition, the premiere Konstanze returns to Bismarckstrasse with Kathryn Lewek.

The Abduction from the Seraglio

A contemporary and topical opera for our time: When US President Richard Nixon lands on Chinese soil one foggy February morning in 1972, the world holds its collective breath. After decades of silence, the rival powers are starting to come together. A momentous instant in diplomatic history and a superlative media spectacle unfolds as cameras and microphones follow Nixon and Mao Zedong constantly. American composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman have taken original, historical documents to create a poppy narration of modern myths and spectacular imagery politics. This minimalist music opera follows the protocol of the state visit like a satirically exaggerated TV documentary, and shows figures between larger-than-life self-presentation and boundless self-deception. Musical theatre collective Hauen und Stechen, known for its anarchic directorial bent, focuses amidst the rush of images on the propagandistic aspect of the summit and provides furious insight into the power plays of the 20th century.

Nixon in China

A digital labyrinth: Tens of thousands of digital posts are made around the world every second. Posts are put up, Tweets are written, videos are uploaded. Two thirds of the global population regularly uses social media, and almost half use them every day. A flow of information crashes against our brains, forcing us to make decisions on unrestricted paths through the ever-expanding digital jungle. We fluctuate between two extremes as this happens: touching animal videos alongside images of accidents, meal recipes and lifehacks followed by acts of violence. This heterogenous crossfire in the endless feed of content being permanently shoved into our faces forms a riptide that the recipient can scarcely escape. To counteract this powerlessness to an extent, Icelandic composer Bára Gísladóttir and French author and director Joris Lacoste search for meaning in this multidimensional chaos with Good Vibes Only. This is the first full-length stage work for the Siemens Music Foundation grant recipient, celebrated for her dark yet sensitive style that blends influences from noise, metal and classical tradition. Multi-talented artist Lacoste, who has garnered attention with his collage-like, documentary theater pieces, is making his operatic debut. In their collaborative creation, the two explore formal structures and human behaviour that emerge from the manifold interplay within the virtually limitless digital realm. The data world is reimagined as a stage. By rearranging real-world posts, a gigantic spectrum of cognitive and emotional expressions about our world is revealed. Good Vibes Only lets the audience experience the sheer breadth of notifications in the data flow of the digital ether in the form of trans-medial musical theatre. Titus Engel, conductor-in-residence and experienced partner for complex debuts, is conducting his first opera production at Deutsche Oper Berlin. In a highly technological spatial concept, diverse vocal styles combine with orchestral sounds and sophisticated electronics to create a panopticon of our digital age.

Good Vibes Only

A clown whose laughter catches in his throat, a ruthless lover, a hitman with a warm voice: In Rigoletto, Verdi assembles bawdy farce, profound character studies and overwhelming emotion into a dazzling grotesque about power and vulnerability. The opera is so much more than „La donna è mobile!” In his production, Jan Bosse tells the tragedy of a man who fails to separate his private life from his public actions. The Deutsche Oper Berlin auditorium becomes the decadent ducal court of Mantua, the understage a claustrophobic hiding place. There, Rigoletto keeps his daughter Gilda hidden from the eyes of the nobles. But as the action unfolds, the carefully separated roles of the cynical court jester and the gentle father begin to crumble. In his futile attempt to protect his daughter, Rigoletto inadvertently destroys his world – until only an empty stage remains. Conductor Anna Handler, already a favourite with the public, will conduct her first Verdi production.

Rigoletto

In times when the world seems complicated and the economic situation is dire, the longing for someone who supposedly offers simple solutions to difficult problems becomes overwhelming. The 20th century provides ample evidence of this, and the present day offers similar examples. In Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, it is a mysterious knight who promises to fight for Elsa of Brabant; in doing so, he becomes a projection screen for the yearning of a fractured people for a charismatic leader. Wagner, himself a revolutionary in the mid-19th century, artistically expressed his political utopia of a different world order in Lohengrin – a utopia of saving the world through art, but here doomed to failure. Eric Cutler, a youthful heroic tenor trained in bel canto, sings the title role, while the Finnish soprano Miina-Liisa Värelä provides the necessary counterweight as Ortrud. Her compatriot, conductor Susanna Mälkki, is making her debut with both the Deutsche Oper Berlin orchestra and the work itself.

Lohengrin

Three men who make a bet. Two women who are the objects of this bet. Don Alfonso has thought up a perfidious game to test the faithfulness of these women: Fernando and Guglielmo are convinced that Fiordiligi and Dorabella would never betray them. They pretend to go off to war and return in disguise to seduce their respective beloved as a supposed stranger: If they succeed, they have lost the bet and Don Alfonso is triumphant. This is the setup for Mozart’s Così fan tutte. A contemporary operatic subject? It is primarily Mozart's music that secures this opera its place in the repertoire to this day, for it looks deep into the characters’ hearts without condemning them. When what began as a light-hearted game develops into a cruel experiment that ultimately pulls the rug out from under everyone involved, the music lays bare the characters’ emotions in all their complexity and contradiction; it plumbs the existential depths of love, which we all experience in the same way regardless of gender – today as in 1790, when Mozart's opera premiered. The Belgian directing collective FC Bergman, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale and recently celebrated a resounding success at the Ruhrtriennale, is inclined towards visually powerful surrealism in its theatrical language and tells – for the first time in Berlin and in only its third opera production – Così fan tutte as a story about young people of today who are playfully searching for answers to the questions of life: What does love mean to us? What roles do we play in life? Who manipulates whom? Is reality truly always more sustainable than fantasy? Riccardo Minasi, one of the most interesting conductors in the field of historical performance practice, is working with the Deutsche Oper Berlin orchestra for the first time. A young ensemble of soloists led by Elsa Dreisig as Fiordiligi explores the psychological facets of this many-layered game of love.

Così fan tutte

This oratorio tells the story of the last days in the life of Jesus Christ. Exactly three hundred years ago, Johann Sebastian Bach set the Gospel text to music: The premiere was held on Good Friday in 1727. Benedikt von Peter’s production takes the inherent tradition of the Stations of the Cross seriously: Bach’s double-choir masterpiece unfolds as an acoustic crucifix; the audience sits amidst the musical action, exposing their own bodies to this Passion and its unsettling beauty. Betrayal, mortal agony, sacrifice and forgiveness do not appear as a distant event of salvation, but as a sober question for our present: What are the sins for which the Son must be sacrificed year after year? Not the Evangelist, but children bring the parable to life. They shoulder the cross, prevent Judas’s suicide with an embrace, and put the value system of a Christian society up for discussion. Marc Minkowski, a renowned specialist in Baroque vocal music and a guest at the Deutsche Oper for the first time, conducts this special revival exactly on the 300th anniversary of the work!

St Matthew Passion

Few figures in world literature embody so many tragic contradictions: Otello is both perpetrator and victim, hunter and prey – the bloodthirsty murderer of his beloved Desdemona, yet also at the mercy of the demonic manipulation of his secret adversary, Iago. Verdi’s operatic version further intensifies the gruesome outcome, as the scheming villain escapes. Kornél Mundruczó makes his debut at Deutsche Oper Berlin with this new production of Otello. His meteoric career in the film industry has garnered him awards at the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals and success on Netflix. Since Aviel Cahn discovered him for musical theatre with Herzog Blaubart/Winterreise in 2013, the internationally acclaimed director has increasingly turned his attention to opera. His psychedelic imagery and exceptional integration of film lend new impetus to the genre and are ideally suited to bringing us closer to the delusional inner world of the character Otello: Mundruczó leads us directly into the protagonist’s psychological abyss. When Verdi began his second Shakespearean setting, he had not dedicated himself to a major new composition for over ten years. The collaboration with Arrigo Boito resulted in a work that occupies a special place in Verdi’s oeuvre. The orchestra gains importance for characterisation and atmospheric development, becoming a fundamental driving force of the action. On the podium is Stefano Montanari, a specialist in early Italian opera; he demonstrated his sensitivity to Verdi’s late works with a fresh approach in a celebrated Otello at the Stuttgart State Opera. With the role of Otello, which demands everything from heroic radiance to lyrical tenderness and even violent outbursts beyond mere beauty of sound, Verdi shattered the conventions of traditional vocal categories. Najmiddin Mavlyanov, in demand worldwide for dramatic tenor roles in the Italian and Russian repertoire, brings all of this to the role. Alongside him, Ruzan Mantashyan makes her debut as Desdemona. Luca Micheletti is playing Iago for the first time outside his native Italy.

Otello

Undoubtedly one of the most famous melodies in operatic history is the popular prisoners’ chorus «Va pensiero,» from Nabucco, which in Verdi’s time was even considered the unofficial national anthem of Italy. Beyond this, however, it was also Verdi’s unerring instinct for theatrically effective situations that made Nabucco the composer’s first major success; here, too, Verdi found his very personal musical-dramatic language. The powerful, contrasting choral scenes, which address the Babylonian-Hebrew conflict, the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile of the Jews are juxtaposed with the story of the disintegration of a ruling family: Abigaille and Fenena are half-sisters, both in love with the young Jew Ismaele. Their father, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, descends into madness and despair. The title role features the charismatic baritone Nicola Alaimo, deeply rooted in the Italian tradition, alongside the radiant Saoia Hernández as Abigaille. The fiery Verdi conductor Antonino Fogliani leads the performance.

Nabucco

The Chinese princess Turandot refuses marriage and demonstrates this with a gruesome ritual: Every suitor who fails to solve her three riddles is beheaded. This brutal cycle continues until Calaf breaks it. With his last, unfinished opera, Turandot, Giacomo Puccini created an unparalleled score that went beyond the famous «Nessun dorma.» To depict a fantastical, fairytale China, he blended traditional Chinese music, pentatonic scales, unusual timbres and stark dissonances into a soundscape that oscillates between lyrical delicacy and brutal force. Franco Alfano completed the opera and wrote an unusually conciliatory ending for Puccini, which is countered in this production by Lorenzo Fioroni: In a timeless state reminiscent of contemporary military dictatorships, brutality and trauma remain omnipresent. Camilla Nylund, known for her incomparable Wagner and Strauss portraits, can be seen here in the challenging title role in the Italian repertoire.

Turandot

Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlo intertwines family tragedy and historical panorama. This grand opera premiered in 1867 and was repeatedly reworked in the following decades. In the four-act Italian version, the abysses of Spanish absolutism open up even more dramatically: arbitrary rule, an emaciated people, fanatical autodafés – and the experience that friendship can be stronger than the hated bonds of blood. Based on Schiller's "dramatic poem", Verdi focuses on the inner conflicts between political duty and personal desire. In Marco Arturo Marelli's production, this struggle is condensed into an archetypal spectacle. Such a drama needs charismatic voices; this season, singers such as German bass Tareq Nazmi as Filippo II, Ève-Maud Hubeaux as Eboli, Adriana González as Elisabetta and Nicola Alaimo as Posa are waiting to be rediscovered. Najmiddin Mavlyanov takes on the title role. Dan Ettinger, who has already been general music director in Mannheim and Tel Aviv, conducts at the Deutsche Oper for the first time.

Don Carlo

«I am the enemy you killed, my friend,» writes an English lieutenant in 1918 on the front in northern France. On the day of the ceasefire, Wilfred Owen falls at the age of 25. The death knell and the peal of peace bells overlap, their echo resonating in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem: an anti-militarist, anti-nationalist monument of remembrance, collective mourning and personal loss. Marked by the violence of two world wars, the work was premiered in 1962 to celebrate the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. Just as the ruins are integrated into the new architecture there, Owen’s poems also disrupt the structure of the Latin Requiem Mass. Britten’s setting draws on the emotional power of the Requiem tradition and incorporates that insight into human nature that distinguishes him as an opera composer. War Requiem stands for pacifism as an artistic stance and, sadly, is no less relevant in our political present. The internationally acclaimed production from London where, in 2018, it commemorated the end of the First World War, also makes a stance for peace. It is now being rehearsed by the artistic team around director Daniel Kramer and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans at the invitation of Deutsche Oper Berlin. In this production, Kramer’s poetically powerful physical work merges with the unconventional, worldly perspective of star photographer Tillmans, who is making his operatic debut in Berlin. Together, they create timeless situations where trauma and solace, weight and intimacy reside. Photographic snapshots crown the space, seeming to observe themselves, coalescing into silent landscapes. In the spirit of artistic exchange, the solo parts at the premiere were to be sung by a Russian soprano, a British tenor and a German baritone. At the last minute, the Soviet government prevented its star soprano from participating. Now this symbolic cast is to be realised under the musical direction of Britten expert Sir Donald Runnicles with Elena Tsallagova, Nicky Spence and Björn Bürger.

Marco Medved

Events

Upcoming events

5 - 18 Sep, 2026

Lucia di Lammermoor · Deutsche Oper Berlin

1 - 13 Nov, 2026

Queen of Spades · Deutsche Oper Berlin

3 - 18 Dec, 2026

The Abduction from the Seraglio · Deutsche Oper Berlin

10 - 30 Jan, 2027

Nixon in China · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Jan 22 - Feb 12, 2027

Good Vibes Only · Deutsche Oper Berlin

About

Marco Medved hasn't added a bio