Lighting Designer

In Götterdämmerung, Siegfried takes leave of Brünnhilde to travel the world and accomplish new feats. These will be his last: during his journey along the Rhine, he falls victim to a sinister plot hatched by Alberich and his son Hagen. The downfall of the gods is now inevitable...

Götterdämmerung

Opéra Bastille

Richard Wagner wrote Die Walküre as the second of four parts of the powerful musical theatre epic, Der Ring des Nibelungen, which is based on the Medieval Nibelungenlied and old Norse god sagas. Wotan, the highest god, has fathered twins with a mortal woman – Siegmund and Sieglinde. These two in turn have a child, in which Wotan sees his dominion consolidated. His wife Fricka defies his plans and, as protector of the traditional marriage rites, demands Siegmund’s death. Wotan reluctantly agrees, although it will cause a split with his favourite daughter.

Die Walküre

Max-Joseph-Platz

A grand decorative opera on the one hand: ancient saga! War between Rome and Gaul, but Norma is also a psychologically fine-grained chamber play about a highly complex woman in the throes of terrible conflicts: Norma, high priestess of the Druids and mistress of the Roman proconsul Pollione. When she is betrayed, this "Casta Diva", this "chaste goddess" is determined to take revenge. It all ends terribly: a love-death burning at the stake! The madness, ecstasy and beauty of total bel canto!

NORMA

The two closely related powerful women, whose graves now lie right beside each other in London’s Westminster Abbey, were “Of One Blood”, so of the same blood. Both were of course as conceivably far apart as possible during their lives. Elizabeth I ruled for almost half a century as Queen of England and Ireland, while Mary Stuart reigned over Scotland for a quarter of a century. A bitter power struggle between the Protestant hegemony and the Catholic opposition and ultimately the pressure of parliament forced the English Queen to have Mary Stuart executed.

Of One Blood

Aida is a slave at the Egyptian court. She is the king’s daughter from the enemy country of Ethiopia but has fallen in love with the Egyptian military leader Radamès. Her father Amonasro uses her to learn about the military strategy of his adversaries. Meanwhile, Amneris, the Egyptian king’s daughter, uses everything in her power to fight for her love for Radamès and tries to kill her rival. Everyone is at the mercy of a ruthless cartel of priests and warriors.

Aida

Bebelplatz

Variety is a scarce commodity in the glum little village depicted by Gaetano Donizetti and his librettist Felice Romani – the only prospects beyond the stifling confines of this backwater seem to be the illusion of a hero’s life as a soldier, even if it might lead to an untimely death.

L’elisir D’amore

Three masterpieces – two centuries – one narrative. There is Schumann's song cycle "Frauenliebe und -leben ," in which the feelings of the nameless protagonist revolve around the needs of a man. There is Duke Bluebeard's Castle , in which two mysterious strangers are magically attracted to each other. And there is the bourgeois, liberal marriage construct of Oscar Wilde's Florentine Tragedy . These raise the question: Do people desire the same throughout all ages?

Women's Love and Death

Hamburg State Opera

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

Olga Neuwirth is one of the outstanding composers of our time. Together with Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, she is writing a new piece of music theater. They send two «vampires» – really avatars of themselves – on a journey around the world. They observe the decline of humanity while a tyrannical king and a self-conjuring sea monster fight for power.

Monster's Paradise

Zurich Opera House

Seeing his love succeed against the will of the parents is pretty difficult in a rural setting. Especially when he is also considered an outsider, things do not look good with the parents-in-law, and there's a lot of money in the mix as well. But what Hans negotiates with Kezal the marriage broker, without discussing it with his beloved Marie, certainly requires a very special kind of chutzpah, and it very nearly goes all wrong – bartering his loved one to a certain person, which turns out through rhetorical trickery to be himself, only becomes evident as a good idea at the end. Which once again proves: The comedy is only a tragedy avoided at the very last minute.

The Bartered Bride

Musical theater on the current state of affairs: As avatars of themselves, the exceptional artists Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek send two "vampires" on a journey around the world and observe the decline of humanity. But what kind of world is this, one that can only be saved by a monster named Gorgonzilla? Tobias Kratzer stages this brand-new political grotesque as a contemporary Grand Guignol.

Monster’s Paradise

Elsa von Brabant is accused of murdering her brother. No one dares prove the young woman’s innocence in this mysterious case. Trapped in a reality that no one seems to share with her, a man enters her life promising to fight for her cause – on one condition: Elsa must trust him blindly and never ask him his name or birthplace.

Lohengrin

Jerusalem and Babylon at the time of Neubchadnezzar around 578 B.C. were the setting of Verdi’s early work, Nabucco. But the Biblical epic about power, love and religion is certainly more than a mere historical drama that might have served as a Hollywood blockbuster, and which places the most stringent demands on the soloists, chorus and stage machinery. Human conflicts are expressed here in highly emotional music and leave an indelible mark, to the present day, on this first, genuinely major operatic success by composer Giuseppe Verdi. Nabucco, the work with the famous prisoners’ chorus “Va pensiero” (“Fly, thought, on golden wings!”), the best-known hymn to freedom ever composed, is a must – and not just for Verdi fans.

Nabucco

The Peri - an angelic mythical creature. Fallen from paradise and thrown into the world, she is denied a return to heaven. It takes three attempts before the gates open for her again: It takes more than the drop of blood of a young man, martyred in war, and the last sigh of a girl who died because she did not want to leave her lover, who was sick with the plague, alone. Only the last gift, the tear of an old man who bitterly regrets his own life's sins at the sight of a child, will enable Peri to enter the kingdom of heaven. Robert Schumann's secular oratorio Paradise and the Peri is based on the oriental epic poem by the Irish poet Thomas Moore. In Hamburg, the Persian myth narrative becomes a panopticon of the very recent past.

EPSG:4326

Paradise and the Peri

Staatsoper Hamburg

In Das Rheingold, the “eve” of Richard Wagner’s operatic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, the course is set for the apocalypse. It will be unleashed by two entirely opposing worldviews exploding into one another. The tragedy of Alberich, who, being mortal, believes he must take everything within his own lifetime. And the drama of Wotan, who in his, real or illusory, immortality must recognise the emptiness and sameness of being eternal.

Das Rheingold

Sir John Falstaff is an anarchist who obeys only the reign of his own enjoyment, an egoist who feeds only his power-hunger and his own flesh, and who would prefer to raze the small-minded morals of his contemporaries like the walls of a fortress – by seducing two women at the same time. Needless to say, his plan is thwarted, but those trying to expose him also fail to emerge unruffled from the confusion they unleash around him – which only the audience can keep track of, barely. “Tutto nel mondo è burla,” but these jokes are only funny because falling into the abyss actually does pose quite a serious risk. Arrigo Boito, the librettist of “Otello”, distilled a sophisticated, ingenious libretto from Shakespeare’s original, driving Verdi to highly complex compositional heights.

Falstaff

To save himself from a fatal storm, King Idomeneo promises the god Neptune that he will kill the first human he encounters. Unfortunately, that turns out to be his son Idamante. The king becomes torn between fatherly love and his promise to the gods. This fateful dilemma is central to Mozart's masterpiece.

Idomeneo, re di Creta

National Opera & Ballet

A coming-of-age story, recurring conflicts with parents, and first love, Manon is a young girl full of hopes, dreams, and an irrepressible desire for life. Manon is to enter a convent and sees her desire for a free, self-determined life fading. However, she falls head over heels in love and flees to Paris, the city of love and opportunity.

Manon

The first two people on earth were in love. The third man killed the fourth. Die ersten Menschen tells the story of the first family in the Biblical history of humanity: Adahm and Chawa and their sons Kajin and Chabel. After the successful performances of the work during the corona pandemic, Rudi Stephan's unknown work, but 'excavated' by Dutch National Opera, returns in full glory.

Those first people

The first two humans on Earth fell in love. The third human murdered the fourth. Die ersten Menschen tells the story of the first family in the Biblical history of humanity, Adahm, Chawa and their two sons Kajin and Chabel. After performances in the midst of the COVID pandemic, which were highly praised by public and press alike, this ‘rediscovered’ work by Rudi Stephan is now returning to Dutch National Opera in all its glory.

Die ersten Menschen

The Carmina Burana with its mighty Fortuna choirs is one of the most famous musical works, but is rarely performed as a trittico teatrale with its two sister works. Carl Orff created a trilogy that searches for new forms of expression for music theater: between opera, oratorio and cantata. Trionfi stands for the fascination of the primal elements of theater, the popular and cultic, ancient and medieval poetry and again and again: the elemental power of rhythm. Life and its earthly pleasures are triumphantly celebrated, the omnipotence of Eros, the awakening of spring. Love and fidelity are negotiated and a wedding ceremony is performed, culminating in an orgiastic cry. - As the subtitle of Carmina Burana, which speaks of magical images, suggests, there are no limits to the imagination of a scenic realization. Archaic and modern meet.

Trionfi

A young woman embarks on a daring mission to rescue her husband.

Fidelio

Royal Opera House

Unique in the history of opera, The Ring of the Nibelung is the colossal tetralogy Richard Wagner worked on for thirty years. First performed in 1869, the Prologue The Rhinegold unveils from its first telluric chord a world riddled with existential questions. Who will obtain the power of the ring forged from the gold of the Rhine? The gods, the giants or the Nibelungen?

Das Rheingold (RING Festival)

The Paris Opera continues its exploration of Richard Wagner’s colossal Ring, directed by Calixto Bieito. After the final scene of The Rhinegold, in which the gods ascend to Walhalla, The Valkyrie, the second part of the cycle, focuses on humans in the form of twins Sieglinde and Siegmund.

Die Walküre (RING Festival)

 With Siegfried, staged in Calixto Bieito’s new production, the Paris Opera presents the third part of Richard Wagner’s extraordinary undertaking, the Ring of the Nibelung. Siegfried, the son of Sieglinde and Siegmund, has become a dauntless young man who knows no fear.

Siegfried (RING Festival)

Götterdämmerung (RING Festival)

Deeply moved by Oscar Wilde’s play, Richard Strauss changed the course of music history with his intense, frantic eponymous opera. The set is King Herod’s Palace; young Salome is infatuated and rejected by Prophet Jochanaan, and, desperate to kiss him at all costs, subsequently asks for his severed head. The expressionist libretto drawn from this mysterious plot is both sensuous and dramatic. As an object – and mostly a subject – of desire, Salome’s magnetic quality is gradually unveiled. The piece, written at the turn of the 20th century, reads like a discovery of the subconscious mind or an exploration of urges. The hypnotic score is replete with unique colours and sounds; Strauss pushed the very limits of music in his time, at the risk of breaking the norms. The lead must be sung by a mesmerising performer, both in terms of voice and presence.

Salome

Opéra National De Lyon

Isolde loves Tristan, and Tristan loves Isolde. A love with no alternative, no chance, because Isolde is to marry King Marke in order to seal the peace between Ireland and Kareol.

Tristan und Isolde

Vienna State Opera

The German composer Richard Strauss based Salome, one of his most celebrated operas, on Oscar Wilde’s eponymous tragedy. The first to portray the title role in the play was the famed French actress Sarah Bernhardt (her company gave four performances at the National Theatre in Prague), whose art also contributed to the popularity of other dramas  (Tosca and Madame Sans-Gêne), subsequently adapted as operas.

National Theatre Prague

Though buried side by side in Westminster Abbey, Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots — cousins “of one blood” — never met in life. Their intertwined reigns ignited a ruthless clash of faith and power that ended in Mary’s execution by Elizabeth’s command.

Lighting Designer

Michael Bauer

Events

Upcoming events

6 - 15 Nov, 2026

Das Rheingold (RING Festival) · Opéra national de Paris

7 - 17 Nov, 2026

Die Walküre (RING Festival) · Opéra national de Paris

10 - 19 Nov, 2026

Siegfried (RING Festival) · Opéra national de Paris

13 - 22 Nov, 2026

Götterdämmerung (RING Festival) · Opéra national de Paris

Mar 19 - Apr 4, 2027

Salome · Opéra National De Lyon

Past events

5 - 18 Oct, 2026

Götterdämmerung · Opéra national de Paris

5 - 18 Oct, 2026

Götterdämmerung · Opéra national de Paris

About

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