Singer

“Exuberant, loud and over-the-top: it’s showtime in the orchestra pit“, as one journalist put it after the premiere in December 2024. And the stage design and costumes continue the theme – albeit with slightly ironic opulence. Casanova is the title of a revue operetta by composers Johann Strauss and Ralph Benatzky. Eric Charell, the “revue king“ of his time, staged the world premiere at Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin in 1928. However, the real hero of the Stuttgart production is not so much Casanova himself, but the character of Barberina, who is embodied on stage by two different artists. She takes over the show and leads us through an evening which centers also on female desire and the lustful play with identities and images of masculinity, femininity and the in-between.

Casanova

Stuttgart Opera

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

The Peri - an angelic mythical creature. Fallen from paradise and thrown into the world, she is denied a return to heaven. It takes three attempts before the gates open for her again: It takes more than the drop of blood of a young man, martyred in war, and the last sigh of a girl who died because she did not want to leave her lover, who was sick with the plague, alone. Only the last gift, the tear of an old man who bitterly regrets his own life's sins at the sight of a child, will enable Peri to enter the kingdom of heaven. Robert Schumann's secular oratorio Paradise and the Peri is based on the oriental epic poem by the Irish poet Thomas Moore. In Hamburg, the Persian myth narrative becomes a panopticon of the very recent past.

EPSG:4326

Paradise and the Peri

Staatsoper Hamburg

It is a finale that marks a new beginning: after four years and the acclaimed productions of Die Walküre , Siegfried and Götterdämmerung , artistic director Aron Stiehl and chief conductor Nicholas Milton will bring the Klagenfurt Ring to a close with Rheingold .

The Rhinegold

Stadttheater Klagenfurt

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

The Staatstheater Stuttgart

Max, the hunter’s apprentice, has to land a direct hit at the upcoming shooting match in order to marry his beloved Agathe. Out of his fear of potential failure, Max gets involved with "dark forces" in the wolf’s canyon: Six sure-fire bullets for his sole use whilst the seventh bullet is reserved for the devil to strike any victim he chooses. Carl Maria von Weber‘s Freischütz, which premiered in 1821, is the epitome of a German romantic opera. Never before have occult, transcendental and supernatural ideas been transformed into music so full of suggestive sounds.

Der Freischütz

A material that is as popular as it is ambivalent and evokes countless associations with one word: Casanova! Just one day after Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had launched probably the theater sensation of the Weimar Republic with the Threepenny Opera in what would later become the Berliner Ensemble, director and choreographer Erik Charell followed suit right next door in the predecessor of the Friedrichstadtpalast. The capital’s press was enthusiastic: “Casanova is a great success. It means the resurrection of the operetta!” (Der Montag). The “electrifying music of Johann Strauss” (Berliner Tageblatt) was not only rearranged by Ralph Benatzky, but also electrified – by “the new instrument vibraphone”, as announced in the program booklet for the premiere.

Tenor

Kai Kluge

Events

Past events

Apr 2 - Jun 12, 2026

Casanova · Staatsoper Stuttgart

Feb 7 - Mar 22, 2026

The Mastersingers of Nuremberg · Staatsoper Stuttgart

Future and recently performed repertoire

Max in Der Freischütz by Weber

Staatsoper Stuttgart

LODGE in Das Rheingold by Wagner

Stadttheater Klagenfurt

Comedian Harmonists in Casanova by Strauss

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Menuzzi in Casanova by Strauss

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Prinz in Undine by Dvořák

Staatsoper Stuttgart

David in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg by Wagner

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Singer in Paradise and the Peri by Schumann

Staatsoper Hamburg

About

Kai Kluge hasn't added a bio