Georges Bizet’s titular heroine is as captivating a character as any in the history of opera. The different interpretations of Carmen are legion: we have the seductress, the personification of forbidden yearning, the standard bearer for the “eternally female” in the brutal battle of the sexes, the anarchist unfettered by bourgeois angst and compulsions, the archaic clairvoyante seeing her own death in the cards - yet free, as she does not dread her destiny. Few opera heroines are so open to interpretation and hence so able to serve as a mirror held up to society.

Carmen

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Rigoletto, the hated and feared courtyard jester at the court of Mantua, has tried everything to keep the existence of his beloved daughter secret from the womanising Duke and the cynical court society. But to no avail: Gilda has fallen in love with the Duke. So, at the beginning of the third act, Rigoletto sees only one way out: to confront his daughter with the Duke's erotic excesses. At the end of the third act, Rigoletto will have lost everything, and only the Duke's ‘La donna è mobile’ echoes through the night.

What's coming up? ... Rigoletto, Act 3

In describing the attributes of his 1851 melodrama based on Victor Hugo’s acclaimed play “Le roi s’amuse” Verdi also puts his finger on the challenges that any director has to address: RIGOLETTO is namely a masterpiece whose particularity lies in the clash between the characters’ psychology and the improbable action of a fantasy storyline.

Rigoletto

When Verdi is on the programme, it can be wonderfully grand and theatrical. That is why his "Messa da Requiem" is being performed as part of the International May Festival in the dimensions it deserves: with two choirs, the in-house choir of the Hessian State Theatre and the choir of the city of Wiesbaden.

7th Symphony Concert

Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden

“As for the effect that a work has as a piece of theatre, I’d say that RIGOLETTO is the best material that I’ve ever set to music […]. It has very powerful scenes, there’s temperament, pathos, a lot of variety.” [Verdi to Antonio Somma, 22nd April 1853]

A garret in Paris on a cold winter’s day around Christmas. Rodolfo, a writer, and Marcello, a painter, are working on their masterpieces. They have no money to buy food, pay the rent or fuel the stove. Colline, a philosopher, returns from the pawn shop empty handed, having failed to get rid of some books. Only Schaunard, a musician, has managed to come up with some victuals, kindling, cigars and cash, so off they go to Café Momus - without Rodolfo, who’s trying to work. Mimì, the embroiderer from next door, arrives to ask for a match to light her candle with. She collapses and loses her key; cue for Rodolfo to fall in love with Mimì, who is terminally ill with TB, although he dumps her two months later because the prospect of her ailment getting steadily worse in her freezing home is too much for him. Six months go by. Musetta, Marcello’s ex, arrives with Mimì, whose condition is grave. Musetta sells some earrings with a view to buying medicine; Colline gives up his coat. Gratitude and happiness for a short while. Rodolfo thinks Mimì is sleeping and her body regenerating, …but in fact she’s dead.

La bohème

Violetta Valéry is beautiful, clever, warm-hearted - and terminally ill. Her life as a noble courtesan is preordained. There is no room for private happiness, not even for her love for the young Alfredo Germont, who conquers her heart and wants to save her from the vicious circle of venal love into a carefree private sphere. There she meets her doom in the shape of Alfredo's father Giorgio Germont....

La travi­ata

Theater Duisburg

Enrico wants his sister to marry Lord Arturo Bucklaw, a match that will save his family from bankruptcy, but Lucia has committed to Edgardo Ravenswood, Enrico’s nemesis, who is asserting his right to family land that is now formally owned by Enrico. A forged letter framing Edgardo as having been unfaithful and blaming Lucia for the predicament the family is in enables Enrico to persuade Lucia to marry Lord Bucklaw. Edgardo throws down the gauntlet to Enrico. Lucia goes insane and dies. Edgardo, grief-stricken at the sound of the death knell, stabs himself to death.

Lucia di Lammermoor

The Dutchman is a cursed man, an outsider, a driven individual. Richard Wagner came upon the character of the famous drifter via Heinrich Heine, who lent the Romantic material his typically ironic touch. Wagner’s interest was tweaked not by Heine’s packaging of the story, which relegated the Dutchman-based action to the margins, but by the tale of the enigmatic mariner, which led to him writing his first opera about the man’s quest for a woman who could offer him redemption. The Dutchman, restlessly plying the borderlands between life and death, encounters Senta, who appears equally ill-at-ease and rootless and yearns for a masculine character, the Dutchman, a figment of her imagination.

Der fliegende Holländer

With the world premiere of his one-act opera, VIOLANTA, the 18-year-old Erich Wolfgang Korngold shifted overnight from child prodigy to one of the leading opera composers of his generation. For VIOLANTA not only heralded the arrival of a young maestro who was as independent as he was variegated in his musical palette, who had an unerring feel for how to render his vision on stage, and who could write melodies that were both expressive and catchy to boot; the 75-minute work to a libretto by Hans Müller, later to be known for co-writing THE WHITE HORSE INN, also served notice that Korngold had caught a contemporary Viennese mood that encapsulated Art Nouveau, psychoanalysis and an end-of-days atmosphere, a quintessence framed by Freud, Klimt and Schnitzler – all mirrored perfectly in the storyline: Violanta, the wife of Venice’s governor, plots during Carnival to avenge, through assassination, her sister, who committed suicide after being seduced by Prince Alfonso. When the moment comes, however, she acknowledges her true motive: to snuff out her own desire to abandon herself to passion. She sacrifices herself to free herself from “lust and guilt”.

Violanta

No other work reflects Puccini's search for new forms of musical theatre like his three-act trilogy IL TRITTICO, which premiered in 1918. In three pieces with different colours and temperatures, he once again brought to the stage what Italian opera could be in those years. In a condensed version, the second and third parts of the triptych now return to the stage of the Deutsche Oper in Karabulut's colourful production: SUOR ANGELICA, a piece with an all-female cast, is unique in opera history and revolves around questions of life and death and the possibilities in between. In her feminist interpretation, Karabulut explores the possibilities of (female) self-determination within a closed system. GIANNI SCHICCHI, on the other hand, follows the tradition of commedia dell'arte, placing humans at the centre as players and greedy deceivers. With her keen sense of timing and a captivating ensemble, Karabulut reveals the bizarre depths of a hypocritical family gathering once again around the deathbed of their patriarch.

Andrei Danilov

Events

Upcoming events

Sep 14, 2025 - Mar 1, 2026

Rigoletto · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Oct 25, 2025 - Jun 12, 2026

Carmen · Deutsche Oper Berlin

18 - 28 Jan, 2026

Der fliegende Holländer · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Jan 25 - Feb 13, 2026

Violanta · Deutsche Oper Berlin

5 - 17 Apr, 2026

Suor Angelica / Gianni Schicchi · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Past events

Oct 25, 2025 - Jun 12, 2026

Carmen · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Sep 21, 2025

What's coming up? ... Rigoletto, Act 3 · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Future and recently performed repertoire

Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi by Puccini

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Rodolfo in La bohème by Puccini

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Alfredo Germont in La traviata by Verdi

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

The Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto by Verdi

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Singer in Requiem by Verdi

Staatstheater Wiesbaden

Helmsman in Der fliegende Holländer by Wagner

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Don José in Carmen by Bizet

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Matteo in Violanta by Korngold

Deutsche Oper Berlin

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