Director

Rebecca is a film star, over fifty, and still going strong. And she's furious. The writer Oscar, 43, recognized her by chance on the street and posted a scathing comment about her on Instagram. She immediately fires back publicly: "Dear asshole, I saw your post. You're like a pigeon that poops on my shoulder as it flies by. I just hope your children get run over by a truck and you have to watch them die, powerless to do anything, their eyes popping out of their sockets." But the feud with Rebecca isn't the biggest problem Oscar has. The feminist, considerably younger blogger Zoé accuses him of harassing her during her time as his press secretary. The accusation: sexualized abuse of power. Within a very short time, Oscar becomes the most prominent persona non grata online . Initially, Rebecca, Oscar, and Zoé only have two things in common: mutual hatred and the loneliness of sitting in front of their computers during the pandemic. But gradually, as they write to each other again and again, an almost tender epistolary novel for the 21st century emerges, about friendship and fear, sex and drugs, about shattered hopes and big dreams.

Dear asshole

Schauspiel Köln

A trail of violence runs through the cursed dynasty of the Atrides long before this opera begins: Elektra's grandfather fed his own sons to his brother, her father Agamemnon sacrificed Elektra's sister Iphigenia, the desperate mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisth slaughtered Agamemnon with an axe in the bath. The children cannot find peace either: Elektra cannot mourn, desperate and raw, she dwells on her hatred. Like must be repaid in kind, the murderous mother and her lover must die. While her sister Chrysotemis refuses to join her, her brother Orest is to take vengeance for their beloved father: The next generation picks up the axe...

Elektra

German Oper am Rhein

"I no longer have time to think about myself. In no year have I worked as much mentally as in this one," wrote the composer Leoš Janáček while he was working on The Cunning Little Vixen . The composition absorbed him completely, so meticulously did he try to translate the sounds of nature and the animal world into music. Janáček got the inspiration for the story about a young vixen who comes into contact with the human world from a newspaper comic. Nevertheless, The Cunning Little Vixen is not a playful fairytale opera, on the contrary. Two worlds collide, that of the animals and that of the humans. The community around the forester and his family as well as the other villagers is cruel and at the same time full of longing for a better life - but who has the answer to the question of what a real life is like? When the forester and the vixen meet in the forest, nature and apparent civilization come face to face. Thus, The Cunning Little Vixen explicitly shows no cute anecdotes about animals, but a pragmatic, uncompromising world in which it is all about survival. And yet there is room for the love between vixen and fox. Janáček succeeds in sounding out the animal in man and the human in the animal, thus holding up a mirror to us. Almost 101 years to the day after its premiere in Brno in 1924, Stephan Kimmig now turns his attention to an opera full of contrasts and the longing to find a place where one can live free of rules, following Der Prinz von Homburg and Das Rheingold . But does this place even exist?

The Cunning Little Vixen

Stuttgart Opera

Gold or love? At the beginning of the tetralogy there is a momentous choice that, strictly speaking, is not a choice. Because Alberich is denied love, he renounces it forever and takes possession of the glittering raw material, which, forged into a ring, promises dominion over all creatures. With this cardinal error, Wagner sets his great world narrative in motion, in which others will also - even if briefly - exchange love for the prospect of gaining power, which sooner or later leads to collapse. Stephan Kimmig shows the mythical beginning as a sad, grotesque end-time game. Gods, giants and dwarves meet in the ruins of a night circus: a playground for exploring dizzying heights and fears of falling, but also a metaphor for a world stuck in a frantic standstill, where three Rhinemaidens of the post-millennial generation are undeterred in their search for ways into the future.

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The Rheingold

The Staatstheater Stuttgart

Director Stephan Kimmig presents a psychological portrait of a doomed love: Verdi's highly emotional condensation of a classic story into a nightmare of the abyss. At the beginning, everything could be quite simple: Luisa loves Rodolfo, Rodolfo loves Luisa. But there are the class differences. And the boundlessly suspicious fathers. The young couple remains steadfast in their burgeoning togetherness and pushes the intensity of their love to its absolute limit. Only to be swept away into a terrible downward spiral of desires, intrigues, and devotion, which must end in an all-consuming tragedy.

Premiere: Luisa Miller

Linz State Theatre

This society is hypocritical! Deceitful! Self-absorbed! Everyone is ingratiating themselves, putting on a fake smile, friendly but not kind. No one can handle honest criticism; everything is wrapped in cotton wool with platitudes and softened with eloquent manners: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, alias Molière, through the mouth of his character Alceste, alias "the misanthrope," emotionally and polemically denounces the court society of his time. But: Doesn't Molière still strike a chord today? Are we capable of genuine criticism, beyond attacks, shitstorms, comment sections, or gossip?

Director

Stephan Kimmig

Events

Upcoming events

Dec 5, 2026

Premiere: Luisa Miller · Bruckner Orchester Linz

Apr 7 - Jun 24, 2027

The Misanthrope · Bühnen Bern

Past events

May 10, 2026

Dear asshole · Bühnen Köln

Apr 7 - Jun 4, 2026

Elektra · Deutsche Oper am Rhein

About

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