Dramaturge

Not all great works are completed: in 1781, the year of the premiere of his Idomeneo , WA Mozart broke off work on his “serious German Singspiel” Zaide , the first attempt at an exoticizing “Turkish opera”, which was followed by the “ light-hearted” Abduction from the Seraglio . But what exactly does “the Turkish” want in it and where does it come from? (Certainly not from Turkey!) Director Jessica Glause uses the surviving Zaide material in Ludwigsburg's Schlosstheater to ask who actually formulates an “us and the others” against the backdrop of which tradition. The history of European musical theater is closely interwoven with the justifying legends of colonialism and racism, ie the arbitrary division of humanity into superior and inferior. Cultures represented as “foreign” through the supposedly neutral standard of the Central European lens have thus been projected into weak, sexualized female figures or despotic ragers again and again over four centuries.

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Zaide

Ludwigsburg Palace

Attractive because repulsive - that’s one way to describe the contradictory fascination potential of William Shakespeare’s most enigmatic character, Othello. He probably could not have existed at the time of his creation: Black, a stranger, yet risen to the top of Venetian society through merit and spectacular eloquence, he marries the beautiful Desdemona.

Otello 

The Staatstheater Stuttgart

In 1930 Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht created a new type of grand opera, radical in both, entertainment as well as criticism. With the wit of an epic theater and the musical esprit of old and worn bar songs mixed with music of the avant-garde, Weill and Brecht built the fable of a city in paradise that finally perishes from its own utopias: in the end there is only one mortal sin left – the sin of insolvency. Together with a young ensemble, director Ulrike Schwab explores the one question: Who would still dare to dream of a better future today.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

No other version of the popular story where a mermaid falls in love with a human man and has to give up her form and herself for the love she craves, tells so beautifully of the two parallel worlds as Antonín Dvořák's opera Rusalka. And no one knows this world so well as the dazzling drag performers with whom director Bastian Kraft doubles Dvořák's forest and water creatures. They are experts in transformation and beautiful appearances in the spotlight. Through lip-synching, the drag performers make the fairy tale of mermaid and prince their own. Alongside a top-class ensemble of singers, they are on a quest for a life in which who we love and who we are no longer determines whose existence takes place in the light and whose is forced to take place in the dark.

Rusalka

Fear of death - a bad advisor since time immemorial: King Idomeneo, whose fleet sinks into the waters of Crete shortly before returning home from the Trojan War, swears to the sea god Poseidon that if he survives, he will sacrifice the first human being he meets on the shore. But as fate – or rather the theater – would have it, this is of course his own son Idamante. To make matters worse, he has fallen in love with a Trojan prisoner, Ilia, which infuriates the Greek princess Elettra. Idomeneo, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s perfect "drama for music", is one of a series of Greek war dramas retold according to the taste of the 18th century.

Dramaturge

Franz-Erdmann Meyer-Herder

Events

Past events

Jun 22 - Jul 12, 2025

Zaide · Staatsoper Stuttgart

May 18 - Jul 18, 2025

Otello · Staatsoper Stuttgart

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