MACBETH was the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be set to music by Verdi, in 1847. Despite his decades of interest in the English playwright, he did not adapt another work of Shakespeare’s until late in his career. Verdi’s operatic rendition of this tale of murky prophecies and bloody struggles for the throne of Scotland came in the hugely productive decade that Verdi himself came to refer to as his »galley slave years«. Still striving for critical recognition, he turned out a string of operas that expanded on the bel canto genre. MACBETH was part of an evolution in Italian opera, a development that was even more evident in the modified version released in 1865. In typical fashion Verdi roughened up the storyline and injected some emotional twists and turns, intensifying the drama in the process and creating a tense momentum that sends the protagonists hurtling towards their respective gruesome ends.

Macbeth

Deutsche Oper Berlin

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

Repelled by the dispassion of the Wartburg society of minnesingers, Tannhäuser, a singer-knight, removes to the interior of the Venusberg in search of fulfilment. Eventually his longing for Elisabeth leads him to leave again. Back at the Wartburg castle, Tannhäuser takes part in a singing contest whose theme is the nature of love, but when he sings that love is ideally about sensual satisfaction, he is cast out and sent to Rome to seek papal absolution. He returns from Rome without the hoped-for indulgence and resolves to return to the Venusberg. Then a miracle occurs and he finds redemption after all.

Tannhäuser and the Singers' Contest at Wartburg

Vienna, circa 1860. The financially strapped Count Waldner is lodging with his family in a Viennese hotel. His only path to solvency is for him to secure an advantageous marriage for one of his two daughters – and the family can only afford to present Arabella, the eldest, in the upper circles of society. To conceal the family’s indigence, the parents have raised Zdenka as a boy, dressing her accordingly. Arabella is not short of suitors but has resolved to wait for ‘Mr Right’. When Mandryka, an aristocrat from a distant region, arrives, he and Arabella are instantly smitten. Arabella only asks to be able to bid farewell to her friends and suitors at the Fasching ball that evening.

Arabella

Long after the Paris world premiere in 1896 Oscar Wilde’s tragedy “Salomé” remained a thorn in the flesh of the establishment across Europe. In Wilhelminian Germany and the Danube Monarchy, too, official art adjudicators considered the subject “repulsive” and the text “an insult to morality”. In the minds of the guardians of public morals the New Testament story of Herod’s daughter was as ill-suited to the stage as it was to pictorial representation, which was experiencing a boom at the time. Salomé’s stepfather, Herod, the Roman’s client king of Judea, Galilee and Samaria who is said to have ordered the massacre of the innocents around Bethlehem, persuades her to dance for him. Encouraged by her mother, she demands to be given the head of John the Baptist as a reward.

Salome

It is common knowledge that Giuseppe Verdi, by nature a critical man, not only found much to disapprove of in the trends of his day but also subjected his own work to a continuous process of editing and revision.

Don Carlo

Giuseppe Verdi’s third opera was his break-out work. By the end of the gestation of NABUCCO the 29-year-old had found his musical style, one that audiences latched onto immediately. It was first and foremost the sheer impact of the chorus scenes and the daringly loud orchestral movements that announced a new chapter in the history of opera. NABUCCO was the first opera to make the chorus one of the main protagonists and the material was ideal for this, with the liberation of the Israelites from Babylonian captivity providing ample occasion for crowd scenes conveying the yearnings and stirrings of an oppressed people. And to top it all, it was not an aria but the “Va, pensiero” Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, sung by the Jewish deportees on the banks of the Euphrates, that became the best known number in the opera – and the most famous Verdi tune of all.

Nabucco

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.

Les Vêpres Siciliennes

One of the astonishing facts of music history is that almost all of the great operas based on Goethe were written in France. Alongside Gounod's and Berlioz's Faust settings and Ambroise Thomas's MIGNON, Jules Massenet's WERTHER is the most prominent example in this series. Premiered in Vienna in 1892, the work is also one of Massenet's most successful operas and, in its expressive immediacy, a pinnacle of the "drame lyrique".

Gerard Farreras

Events

Upcoming events

Oct 5, 2024 - Apr 13, 2025

Tannhäuser and the Singers' Contest at Wartburg · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Nov 27, 2024 - Jan 25, 2025

Macbeth · Deutsche Oper Berlin

7 - 20 Mar, 2025

Arabella · Deutsche Oper Berlin

8 - 14 Mar, 2025

Salome · Deutsche Oper Berlin

8 - 29 May, 2025

Don Carlo · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Past events

Nov 27, 2024 - Jan 25, 2025

Macbeth · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Oct 31 - Dec 18, 2024

Lucia di Lammermoor · Deutsche Oper Berlin

Future and recently performed repertoire

A doctor / An assassin in Macbeth by Verdi

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Raimondo in Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti

Deutsche Oper Berlin

5th Jew in Salome by Strauss

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Count Lamoral in Arabella by Strauss

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Reinmar in Tannhäuser by Wagner

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Johann in Werther by Massenet

Deutsche Oper Berlin

A monk in Don Carlos by Verdi

Deutsche Oper Berlin

High priest of Baal in Nabucco by Verdi

Deutsche Oper Berlin

The Lord of Bethune in Les vêpres siciliennes by Verdi

Deutsche Oper Berlin

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