The festive opera night lasts approx. 2 hours without an interval. After the stage programme, the opera will remain open: With music, culinary offerings and artistic interventions, you can experience a unique "Night at the Opera".

Festive opera night for the German Aids Foundation

Deutsche Oper Berlin

DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG was Richard Wagner’s only light-hearted opera and remains one of his most popular works. This notwithstanding, MEISTERSINGER is also the musical manifesto of a German national art movement and, as such, has accumulated so much baggage over the years that people are apt to lose sight of the opera’s essence – a jolly and coherent comedy with its helter-skelter storyline centring on illusion and reality, love, ageing and the plying of one’s art – and this despite the core theme of a life dominated by music determining not only the cast of characters but also the action of the piece. The members of the master-singers guild have convened to make music in accordance with their strict rulebook. One of the singers, the wealthy Veit Pogner, has granted his daughter Eva the freedom to choose which suitor she will marry – with the proviso that it be a master singer, in other words the winner of a public singing competition. A pity, then, that Eva is in love with Walther von Stolzing, who is talented but devoid of formal training. Nonetheless he takes part in the competition, aided and abetted by master singer Hans Sachs, who has to forego his love for Eva in the process.

The Mastersingers of Nuremberg

For his first commission for the Paris Opéra Verdi demanded a libretto that was “immense, passionate and original”. What he eventually got from star author Eugène Scribe was a text whose political edginess rivalled the grand opéras of Giacomo Meyerbeer, with whom Scribe had collaborated on LES HUGUENOTS and LE PROPHETE. Like these two works, LES VÊPRES SICILIENNES explored a subject that was not only historical but also highly topical. Parallels could easily be drawn between the “Sicilian Vespers” uprising in 1282 against the island’s French occupiers and the most conspicuous of France’s mid-19th-century expansionist ventures, the conquest and colonialization of Algeria, which began in 1830 and was dogged by an ongoing series of brutally quelled revolts.

Gideon Poppe

Events

Upcoming events

12 - 27 Apr, 2025

The Mastersingers of Nuremberg · Deutsche Oper Berlin

18 - 31 May, 2025

Les Vêpres Siciliennes · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Past events

Nov 2, 2024

Festive opera night for the German Aids Foundation · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Future and recently performed repertoire

Singer in Die Fledermaus by Strauss

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Kunz Vogelsang in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Wagner

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Daniel in Les vêpres siciliennes by Verdi

Deutsche Oper Berlin

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