Your own daughter’s hand as a prize in a singing competition – imagine that! There could hardly be a stronger sign of the belief in the systemic relevance of art. And indeed, goldsmith Veit Pogner, who offers his daughter Eva as a prize, is just one of many masters from Nuremberg for whom their art is more than just a nice-sounding sideline: it is no less than a community-building and society-improving force. In the Meistersinger, we encounter a group of utopians who are not interested in their origins or money, but in innovation and the future. Eva’s own attitude to the whole thing is, as so often, of secondary importance. She already knows who she would like to be sung by and who she would rather not. Wagner initially conceived Die Meistersinger as a comic opera, and so everything ends on a superficially happy note: at the end, Eva’s crush Stolzing wins the competition and the bride – an impoverished squire, of all people. The future comes from the past, not only in terms of the son-in-law’s origins, but also with regard to the end of the utopia: the whole thing culminates in the Meistersinger Hans Sachs, who mentored the Junker Stolzing to victory, being crowned King of Art: “Heil Sachs!” and glory to the holy German art. In Wagner’s works, the monstrous often peeps through the tiniest of cracks. With the Meistersinger, Elisabeth Stöppler and Cornelius Meister also tell a piece of German history and mentality between awakening and restoration and, in this German Midsummer Night's Dream (Elisabeth Stöppler), focus on the relationship between the generations and the question of why what was is perhaps also what will be.

The Mastersingers of Nuremberg

Stuttgart Opera

The Queen of the Night asks Tamino to free Pamina from the clutches of the supposed villain Sarastro. And so, together with the bird catcher Papageno, he sets out to become a hero. But there are many surprises awaiting him on his adventurous rescue mission... Barrie Kosky's multimedia staging, which the director developed together with the British artists' collective “1927”, has long enjoyed cult status around the world. The imaginative interplay of scene, music and video animation elegantly transposes Mozart's opera into the present day.

The Magic Flute

German Oper am Rhein

Giulio Cesare has defeated his enemy Pompeo and chased him all the way to Egypt. Against Caesare's will, however, Pompeo was then executed by the Egyptian king Tolomeo. The wife and son of the slain man swear to avenge him. Cleopatra, meanwhile, wants the Egyptian throne all to herself. In order to get it, she must get rid of her brother Tolomeo and win Cesare's support. She seduces him, he falls for her - and makes Cleopatra Queen of Egypt.

Julius Caesar in Egypt

Theater Duisburg

Katerina Ismailova is wealthily married and lonely, her husband impotent and her father-in-law a tyrant. She is trapped in a world where merciless brutality, despotism and cruelty reign. The woman with a lust for life and love gives way to her raw longing for freedom when Sergei starts working for the Ismailov family. She throws herself into a passionate affair with him and poisons her father-in-law's food. But the increasing radicalism of her desire for self-determination will claim further victims ...

Lady Macbeth von Mzensk

Theatre, theatre everywhere! During rehearsals for the highly tragic period piece ‘Romulus and Ersilia’, everything somehow goes wrong: the prima donna doesn't feel well, the trouser role doesn't like itself and the tenor finally wants to play first violin.
And to make matters worse, Mamma Agata, the second soprano's weird helicopter mother, bursts in...

Prima la Mamma!

With the sadistic police chief Scarpia, Giacomo Puccini enriched opera literature by one of its most abysmal characters. The painter Cavaradossi falls into his hands when he helps a political prisoner to escape. But for Scarpia, Cavaradossi is just a decoy through which he hopes to finally make the celebrated singer Tosca submissive. A perfidious game of cat and mouse begins for the life of her lover. In an unleashed frenzy of sound, Puccini mercilessly drives his protagonists through a hurricane of emotional states of emergency that has lost none of its power to this day.

Torben Jürgens

Events

Upcoming events

3 - 16 Jul, 2026

Tosca · Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Past events

Feb 7 - Mar 22, 2026

The Mastersingers of Nuremberg · Staatsoper Stuttgart

Dec 10, 2025 - Mar 13, 2026

The Magic Flute · Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Future and recently performed repertoire

Angelotti in Tosca by Puccini

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Sarastro in The Magic Flute by Mozart

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Maestro Andreas in Prima la Mamma! by Donizetti

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Hans Foltz in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg by Wagner

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Curio in Julius Caesar in Egypt by Händel

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

About

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