Stage Director

Julies Massenet’s much loved opera Werther moves between ecstasy and resignation, dream and reality, sensual desire and the longing for death. Central to this feverish drama, based on Goethe‘s 1774 epistolary novel, are Werther and his impossible love for Charlotte, who promised her dying mother to marry dependable Albert. Charlotte repeatedly turns Werther down, although she shares his feelings. It ends with Werther taking his life on Christmas Eve.

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Werther

Oper Frankfurt

The outsider Herman loves Liza, who is engaged to Prince Yeletsky. Herman is a passionate gambler: he is desperate to win a fortune and reputation in order to win Liza’s heart. When he learns that her grandmother knows the secret of the three winning cards, fate takes its course.

Pique Dame

Hamburg State Opera

Staatsoper Hamburg

While La Bohème consists only of poetry and not of action, it is said that with Tosca it is the other way around: only action, no poetry. Even the librettist Giuseppe Giacosa considered Sardou's original completely unsuitable for an opera. “What made Puccini come to terms with such a real and dealing with a brutal subject whose actors are little more than puppets entangled in a highly intelligent, cleverly designed plot? ”asked the music critic Mosco Carner. Maybe just that? For over 20 years Willy Decker's classic production of Puccini's Sex and Crime masterpiece has been a repertory perennial.

Tosca

The Staatstheater Stuttgart

This quote from Franz Kafka would be an apt subtitle for Britten's Billy Budd. The satanic officer Claggart succeeds in making the angelic and therefore guileless sailor Billy Budd, who is loved by everyone, innocently guilty and thus destroyed.









Billy Budd

Vienna State Opera

La traviata, one of Verdi's best-known titles, takes to the stage of the Teatro Real in Willy Decker's iconic production, which could not be performed in 2020 due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. A classic that comes with great artists such as Nadine Sierra, Xabier Anduaga and Adela Zaharia.

La traviata

Teatro Real

When the Norns weave the thread of fate at the beginning of Richard Wagner's "Götterdämmerung," the end of the world of the gods is already certain. The hero Siegfried falls victim to an intrigue at the court of the Gibichungs, and Brünnhilde resolves to return the Ring to the Rhinemaidens. The male principle, in its insane quest for power and dominance, has destroyed itself. Only the female can oppose the impending apocalypse and develop the saving power for a new beginning. In the final part of "The Ring of the Nibelung," Richard Wagner takes up the major threads of the tetralogy once again and combines them into an apotheosis. In Willy Decker's production of Richard Wagner's drama of humanity, everything is "theater within the theater," and so the abdicated god Wotan lets the curtain fall at the end.

Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods)

Semper Opera Dresden

Siegfried, the son of Sieglinde, who was saved in Die Walküre, and Siegmund, who was killed, grows up on the edge of the world with Alberich's brother Mime. Mime hopes that Siegfried will fight for the powerful ring for him. But the ignorant Siegfried turns against his foster father, and after he has taken the ring from the killed giant Fafner, he also kills Mime. Guided by a forest bird, he awakens the sleeping Brünnhilde. Now the two could save Wotan's world of gods – if love weren't stronger than political reason. »Siegfried« is the most theatrical part of Wagner's tetralogy »The Ring of the Nibelung«. Director Willy Decker therefore created his Dresden stage cosmos as a theater within a theatre. However, those who flaunt themselves on the stage and who take the position of observer

Siegfried

Semperoper Dresden

In a "church of the past", he keeps everything that reminds him of the dead - and binds him. But the grief paralyzes, hollows out and keeps Paul away from the present and the future. Until he meets Marietta, the spitting image of the deceased. The femme fatale awakens erotic desires, but also the pull of memory - and brings him to the limits of his existence.

Die tote Stadt

The men who succumb to her and perish because of her cannot and do not want to know who Lulu really is. But therein lies the tragedy of Lulu, who kills Dr. Schön, the only person who really means something to her, and ultimately falls victim to the murderer of women, Jack the Ripper, as a run-down prostitute in London.

Stage Director

Willy Decker

Events

Upcoming events

Apr 25, 2027

Die tote Stadt · Wiener Staatsoper

May 17, 2027

Lulu · Wiener Staatsoper

Past events

Mar 6 - Apr 17, 2026

Werther · Oper Frankfurt

Feb 7 - Mar 13, 2026

Pique Dame · Staatsoper Hamburg

About

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