"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

Small cause - big effect: In paradise, an apple was enough to plunge humanity into misfortune until Judgement Day. In 1972, the East German writer Peter Hacks surprised his audiences in both East and West Germany when he turned the biblical story of the fall of the first human couple into a comedy. It was his eye for the absurdities of existence, trained in everyday life in the GDR, that enabled him to reveal the humor in the story of the fall in linguistic virtuosity. At the same time, with his comedy Adam and Eve, he created a sharp-tongued plea for a concept of freedom that eludes all moral categories. Did Adam and Eve act rightly or wrongly? It doesn't matter - they acted. Mike Svoboda, composer and trombonist, American in Switzerland and a musical crossover between new music, jazz, performance and subtle humor, has so far concentrated as an opera composer on works for young and very young audiences. So trained in the combination of sophistication and lightness, Svoboda is predestined to set Hacks' paradisiacal comedy to music and demonstrate its topicality. Anne-May Krüger wrote the libretto for his music theater Adam and Eve. The composer himself conducts the hr Symphony Orchestra.

Adam and Eve

Rococo Theater

Music theatre in a prologue and three acts by Mike Svoboda (music) and Anne-May Krüger (libretto) based on Peter Hacks' comedy of the same name

Adam und Eva

Schlosstheater Schwetzingen

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.

EPSG:4326

Falstaff

Staatsoper Hamburg

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 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

In the summer of 1782, in his twenties, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart celebrated his greatest opera success yet. With Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), he composed an enormously significant, pioneering work for the Deutsches Nationalsingspiel that had been founded by the Habsburg emperor Joseph II in Vienna, with inspired music and impressively rendered characters.

Anja Rabes

Events

Upcoming events

Nov 9 - Dec 10, 2025

The Cunning Little Vixen · Staatsoper Stuttgart

Apr 7 - Jun 4, 2026

Elektra · Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Jun 27 - Jul 11, 2026

Die Entführung aus dem Serail · Staatsoper Berlin

Past events

Nov 9 - Dec 10, 2025

The Cunning Little Vixen · Staatsoper Stuttgart

May 4, 2025

Adam and Eve · SWR Symphonieorchester

About

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