Lighting Designer

The term «butterfly effect» is emblematic of the realization that in nature everything is connected to everything else and that the smallest interventions in a natural balance can trigger major effects. It is no different in art. In this program, the Junior Ballett, which embodies the dance of the future, explores the «Butterfly Effect». In addition to ballet director Cathy Marston, two representatives of a new generation of choreographers, Lucas Valente and Ihsan Rustem, created pieces for the Junior Ballet.

The Butterfly Effect

Zurich Opera House

Scylla lives withdrawn into herself, as if in emotional hibernation. Reason, peace, and harmony reign in her cosmos. When Glaucus enters her life, everything changes: She experiences love in all its colors and facets – and does not recognize herself. The opera describes all the lust, wildness, panic, and despair that the young woman experiences as she rediscovers the world for herself. In the end, she will be someone else. Jean-Marie Leclair's rarely performed only opera is a musical discovery. Director Claus Guth returns to Opernhaus Zürich with this new production.

Scylla and Glaucus

Giuseppe Verdi’s «Messa da Requiem» is one of the most popular pieces in the concert repertoire. In a sensational co-production by the Oper Zürich and Ballett Zürich, Christian Spuck brought the oratorio for four solo voices, choir, and orchestra to the stage in 2016, as a combination of dance, abstract scene, space, and light. In his internationally acclaimed production, Spuck focuses on the human creature in the face of death and embarks on a sensitive search for traces of the whence and whither of the human being, between the terrifying proximity of death, loneliness, community solidarity, and mourning.

Requiem Mass

For Figaro and Susanna, it was supposed to be the most beautiful day of their lives: their wedding day. But their employer, Count Almaviva, who is equally in love with Susanna, does everything he can to delay the wedding. Twenty-four turbulent hours begin, in which the power of Eros throws every character in the play into confusing emotional states. Director Jan Philipp Gloger sets Mozart’s masterpiece in the present day, highlighting the way a supposedly irresistible man gets ensnared in a complex code of conduct designed to prevent abuse of power and sexual assault.

The Marriage of Figaro

This four-part ballet evening brings together two legendary dance pieces and two world premieres.

The Ballett Zürich has a long-standing relationship with the American choreographer William Forsythe. His «New Suite» from 2012, set to music by Bach, Händel, and Berio, combines eight technically demanding duets from different creative periods, forming a showcase of his work «en miniature». Hans van Manen made dance history in 1979 with his video ballet «Live». Created in the pioneering days of video technology, this piece for two dancers, a pianist, and a cameraman explodes the boundaries of the stage space, revealing itself to be a masterful puzzle game about the mechanisms of perception.

Timeframed

Clara Schumann was very likely the most important pianist of her time. Her life – as a daughter, artist, wife, mother, carer, manager, and muse – was full of ups and downs, and she devoted it entirely to music. In a world dominated by men, she displayed a degree of independence and self-determination that was astonishing for a woman of her time.

Cathy Marston follows the path of this exceptional artist, and focuses on Clara and her divorced parents, her relationship with Robert Schumann, and her connection with Johannes Brahms in her ballet, which premiered in 2024. She tells of devotion and passion, inspiration and responsibility.

Clara

Be someone else for a night? It’s not just frustrated Rosalinde and her employee Adele, who would much rather have been an artist, who dream of it. Together with Gabriel von Eisenstein, who has just been sentenced to prison, and Dr. Falke, who is bent on revenge, they go to Prince Orlofsky's crazy ball. Here, of all places, all the masks drop. Austrian director Anna Bernreitner stages this most Viennese of all operettas in costumes by renowned fashion designer Arthur Arbesser. It’s an evening with champagne moods, missed opportunities, and the lightness inherent in darkness, musically directed by the Swiss conductor Lorenzo Viotti.

The Bat

«L'amour est un oiseau rebelle», sings Carmen in Georges Bizet’s opera of the same name. Mats Ek, the Swedish dance legend, made Carmen the heroine of a ballet at the Cullberg Ballet in 1992. He based it closely on the novella by Prosper Mérimée, which also forms the basis for the opera, in which Don José tells the story of Carmen from his death cell. Playing with classic gender roles, Mats Ek avoids common Carmen clichés and finds a deeply human interpretation. Another strong female figure is at the center of Dani Rowe’s choreography. After a career as a dancer with the Australian Ballet and the Nederlands Dans Theater, the Australian-born choreographer now heads the Oregon Ballet Theater. She is creating her first choreography for the Ballett Zürich, set to the music of Mussorgsky’s «Bilder einer Ausstellung», in the orchestral version by Maurice Ravel.

Rebel Birds

Goldberg is a highly virtuosic and deeply poetic dance piece—inspired by a musical masterpiece: Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations . To open his first season as director of the Hannover State Ballet, Goyo Montero's Goldberg, which premiered in Nuremberg in 2022 , not only brings an entire compendium of his dance art to the stage, but also a portrait of the fascinating personalities of his newly formed company, which, with this premiere, is presenting itself as an ensemble for the first time. We owe
the composition of the Goldberg Variations to the ailing Count Keyserlingk, who commissioned a cycle of variations from Bach as a remedy for his insomnia. What Bach then delivered, however, is anything but sleep music. Rather, the work, first published in 1741 simply as "Clavier-Übung," unfolds as an instrumental world theater. It is music that reflects the entirety of human life and, in Goldberg, becomes the starting point for dance variations on the theme of "dreams." Cheerful and profound, playful and powerful, formally rigorous and sensual, Goyo Montero uses the language of movement to penetrate the beauties and depths of the night. Carried by a composition by Canadian Owen Belton, who counterpoints and re-illuminates Bach's variations with his own soundscapes—live and electronic—Goyo Montero stages a play and counterplay of dreams and nightmares.

Goldberg

Staatstheater Hannover

Her father hopes that she will be cured by the famous physician Ibn-Hakia - only when she can see will Iolanta meet her fiancé Robert of Burgundy. But things turn out differently: Robert wants to break off the engagement because he loves another princess. His companion and friend Vaudemont, on the other hand, falls in love with Iolanta at first sight and she returns his love. Love becomes the key to treatment, the cure succeeds and Iolanta learns to see.

Iolanta

Vienna State Opera

Ian McEwan, born in 1948, is one of the most important voices in contemporary English literature. His successful 2001 novel Atonement is about a life spent atoning for an early debt: Through a deliberate false statement, Briony Tallis, a pubescent, overzealous writer in 1930s England, puts her older sister’s unfit lover in prison and destroys the lives and loves of two people

EPSG:4326

Atonement

Opernhaus Zürich

Ballet by Kim Brandstrup after works by Hans Christian Andersen

Of Light, Wind and Waters

Age recommendation: 12 and up Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary is a masterpiece of world literature that paved the way for modernism. When it was published in 1856, a scandal ensued. Flaubert was accused of «glorifying adultery and charged with violating public and religious morality and decency». The novel tells the story of a young country woman who wants much more than a suffocating provincial life at the side of her petit-bourgeois, unambitious husband. Emma Bovary rebels against her marriage, takes on lovers, loses herself in dreams of passion, luxury and debauchery – and it ends in disaster. She falls hopelessly into debt, ruins her family and finally takes a fatal dose of poison. ‹Bovarism›, a condition in which a person denies reality, is named after the protagonist of Flaubert’s famous novel: Emma Bovary escapes from her dull life in the provinces through excessive fantasies, which she cultivates by reading romantic novels and Parisian fashion magazines. Her extramarital affairs mirror this kitsch, fantasy world, as she lives beyond her means and loses sight of reality. Measured against its literary fame, Madame Bovary is rarely performed on stage, particularly as a ballet. Flaubert’s narrative style seems too cool and realistic for a stage adaptation. But precisely his detached, accurate language, combined with his total engagement with his subject matter, makes it so inspiring. The female figure as an outsider is at the centre of this new production, which does not tell Madame Bovary as a conventional story ballet but instead breaks up narrative structures and approaches the material through abstract choreography and intimate psychological observation. At the same time, it never loses sight of the tale. Christian Spuck’s dance piece Bovary is about the search for female self-determination, rapture and loneliness, substitutions for love, self-injury, hedonism and the fatal outcome when fantasy worlds and reality merge into one. The concept for this new production by the Staatsballett Berlin is to adapt the literary material using darkly poetic imagery and refined humour – to tell the story, not for the sake of telling it, but to enter the characters’ inner worlds and transform them into dance.

Bovary

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Opera buffa in four acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte

Le nozze di Figaro

Ballet in two acts by Patrice Bart after Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot
Libretto by Théophile Gautier and Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges

Giselle

In William Shakespeare’s drama «Romeo and Juliet», the power of love allows two young people to transcend ordinary human limitations. Thanks to Sergei Prokofiev’s music, the star-crossed lovers of Verona have conquered the ballet stage. He brilliantly captured the clashing of love and hate and the juxtaposition of tenderness and violence in his colorful, passionate score.

Romeo and Juliet

In William Shakespeare's drama "Romeo and Juliet," the power of love allows two young people to transcend their limitations. The lovers of Verona have conquered the ballet stage thanks to the music of Sergei Prokofiev. He masterfully captured the clash of love and hate, and the juxtaposition of tenderness and violence, in his vibrant, passionate score. Cathy Marston brings the world's most famous love story to the stage with the Zurich Ballet as a world of contrasts, where everything can change in an instant: around the next corner awaits the love of your life, or perhaps death itself.

This is a gripping operatic thriller of emotions, with which the then 21-year-old Gioacchino Rossini catapulted himself to the forefront of Italian composers from Venice in 1813: Amenaide is to obey her father's will and marry a man she does not love. In doing so, she contributes to ending the power struggle between two rival families in her hometown. Amenaide, in the meantime suspected of being a traitor and threatened with death, loves Tancredi, who returns to his hometown incognito, learns of the forced betrothal and kills his rival. But the trusting relationship with Amenaide is gone, Tancredi is desperate and wants to find death. Although an early work, TANCREDI with its lively melodies and resounding finales testifies to Rossini's musical inventiveness. It is above all the solo scenes in which the work builds up to its highlights. With the catchy cabaletta of the eponymous hero "Di tanti palpiti", the work contains a veritable opera hit, which in Italy effectively has the status of a folk song. The male main character Tancredi is in this case cast with a mezzo-soprano, a "trouser role" characteristic of the early 19th century. Musically, however, TANCREDI has much more to offer than this one big hit. Rossini developed new ways for the romantic Italian opera with his so-called "Rossini Code" also in terms of form - often a tempo d’attacco, an adagio, a tempo di mezzo and a cabaletta follow one another. The successful production of the Bregenz Festival from the year 2024, directed by Jan Philipp Gloger, is now being presented in Cologne. Jan Philipp Gloger, most recently in Cologne for the direction of EIN MASKENBALL, focuses his production on the love between two women who have little chance of self-fulfilment in a clan and macho world. The musical direction is held by George Petrou.

Tancredi

Cologne Opera

Marcos Morau’s « Nachtträume» was the Ballett Zürich highlight of the year in 2022, lauded as a «dance panopticon and abysmal Gesamtkunstwerk of dance, text, music, and impressive images» (NZZ). In his ninety-minute piece, the Spanish choreographer undertakes a disturbing nightmare journey with Ballett Zürich into the realms of power, powerlessness, and mindless allegiance. He succeeds in creating a profound analysis of the present, in which power and vanity, envy and greed for profit, social Darwinism and economic primacy all too often have us in a stranglehold. 

Night dreams

Tannhäuser lived for seven years in the dream world of the Venusberg, but even his return to the stifling society of Wartburg Castle brings no fulfillment. A pilgrim between worlds, he is homeless. The Icelandic director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson, known for his compelling interpretations of mythical material and grand narratives, stages "Tannhäuser" as an existential drama of identity and a surreal journey into the human psyche. Wagner condensed the search for meaning and stability in a world that seems to be slipping away into a philosophical description of the world.

Tannhäuser

“Love is a rebellious bird,” sings Carmen in Georges Bizet’s opera of the same name. In 1992, the Swedish dance legend Mats Ek made Carmen the title character of a ballet for the Cullberg Ballet. He closely follows the novella by Prosper Mérimée on which the opera is based, in which Don José recounts Carmen’s story from his death cell. Playing with classical gender roles, Mats Ek avoids common Carmen clichés and arrives at a profoundly human interpretation. The Australian choreographer Dani Rowe, who now directs the Oregon Ballet Theatre, presents “Vestige,” set to the music of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” in Maurice Ravel’s orchestral arrangement. In episodic visions, people, impressions, and experiences pass before the main character, “Human,” allowing her to draw new strength from her memories.

Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary is considered a masterpiece of French realism and a pioneering work of literary modernity. Flaubert devoted five years to writing this work, which was published in 1856 and caused a scandal due to its unflinching portrayal of adultery and forbidden desires. With his precise, distantly observing style, Flaubert created a new form of storytelling that rendered inner states and social constraints with striking clarity.

William Shakespeare tells a story of love and transformation in his comedy "A Midsummer Night's Dream." He interweaves the paths and detours of Eros in several plot lines, inevitably leading to mix-ups, misunderstandings, and hilarious scenes. Ballet director Cathy Marston and designer Richard Hudson stage their "Midsummer Night's Dream" in a dilapidated, abandoned fairground. Providing a counterpoint to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's famous incidental music is Gabriel Prokofiev's "Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra No. 1." Robert Houssart conducts the Zurich Opera Orchestra and receives expert support from the popular British DJ Mr. Switch.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Bernhard-Theater

To be someone else for one night? Rosalinde, who would much rather have been an artist, isn't the only one who dreams of this. Together with the recently imprisoned Gabriel von Eisenstein, the servant Adele, and the vengeful Dr. Falke, she embarks on a journey to Prince Orlofsky's infamous party, a world where anything goes. Camilla Nylund sings Rosalinde in Anna Bernreitner's production, with costumes by fashion designer Arthur Arbesser.

The bat

The very title of this two-part ballet promises an evening of contrasts: tempo versus slowness. In 2027, the ballet world will celebrate Jiří Kylián's 80th birthday. For over three decades, he shaped the profile of Nederlands Dans Theater, which, under his direction, has developed into one of the world's leading contemporary ballet companies. The Prague native has also been associated with the Zurich Ballet since 1997. In slow motion, six figures move through his piece "Last Touch First," reminiscent of Chekhov and Ibsen. On the fine line between perceived movement and immobility, psychodramas full of desire, despair, and pathos unfold. Canadian-born Stephanie Lake is one of the most important dance figures in her adopted home of Australia. She is resident choreographer of the Australian Ballet and resident choreographer with the Semperoper Ballet. With her Melbourne-based Stephanie Lake Company, she tours the world. In her creations, she explores the relationship between the individual and the collective. She is choreographing a fast-paced group piece for the Zurich Ballet to a new score by Robin Fox, dominated by percussion instruments.

Slow Rush

A decision that irrevocably changes the world. "Doctor Atomic" depicts the dramatic night before the first atomic bomb test. At its heart is physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, torn between scientific triumph and moral responsibility. John Adams's captivating drama, with a libretto by Peter Sellars, is based on historical accounts, poems, and documentary statements. It offers a multifaceted perspective on the destructive power of human invention. Internationally renowned artist Vanessa Beecroft, known for her monumental and provocative tableaux of the human body that straddle performance, conceptual art, and sculpture, makes her directorial debut at the Zurich Opera House with this production.

Doctor Atomic

This four-part ballet evening unites two legendary dance pieces and two new creations for the Zurich Ballet. The company has a long-standing relationship with William Forsythe. His "New Suite," premiered in 2012 and set to music by Handel, Bach, and Berio, brings together eight duets from different periods of his career, creating a virtuosic pas de deux retrospective by the American choreographer. After a long career as a dancer, the Brazilian Lucas Valente is successfully transitioning to choreography. "Bare" is his first piece for the Zurich Ballet. Here, the large ensemble draws all its energy solely from the soundscape of its own movements. The Greek choreographer Andonis Foniadakis is known for his energetically charged, contemporary creations. In "Orbit," the dancers orbit like galactic celestial bodies, pushed to their physical and mental limits. With his video ballet "Live," Hans van Manen has made dance history. Created in 1979 during the pioneering days of video technology, the piece for a pair of dancers, a cameraman and a pianist breaks the boundaries of the stage space and proves to be a masterful puzzle about the mechanisms of perception.

An officer, an unattainable love and a deadly secret: Hermann loves Lisa, who is under the care of the old countess, but as a penniless outsider, his path to her remains blocked.

The Queen of Spades

For Figaro and Susanna, it was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives: their wedding day. But their master, Count Almaviva, who is equally in love with Susanna, does everything in his power to postpone the marriage. Twenty-four turbulent hours ensue, during which all the characters in this piece are swept away by the power of Eros into confusing emotional states. Director Jan Philipp Gloger transposes Mozart's masterpiece to the present day and shows how a seemingly irresistible man becomes entangled in a web of codes of conduct against abuse of power and sexual assault.

The Marriage of Figaro 2027

The biblical story of Samson and Delilah, set in ancient Gaza, illustrates how closely emotions and politics have always been intertwined. To break the power of the Hebrews, the priestess Delilah seeks to uncover the secret of Samson's strength and feigns love for him. But Samson's revenge is terrible when he brings down the temple of Delilah's people, killing himself in the process. Among the most poignant moments in Camille Saint-Saëns' most successful opera is Delilah's seduction scene, "Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix" (My heart opens to your voice). Mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb and tenor Stanislas de Barbeyrac make their stage debuts in the title roles under the direction of Gianandrea Noseda. Evgeny Titov, who skillfully combines sensuality with psychological depth in his work, directs.

Lighting Designer

Martin Gebhardt

Events

Upcoming events

Mar 27 - May 2, 2026

Scylla and Glaucus · Opernhaus Zürich

May 23 - Jun 26, 2026

Romeo and Juliet · Opernhaus Zürich

May 23 - Dec 27, 2026

Romeo and Juliet · Opernhaus Zürich

Jun 20 - Jul 5, 2026

Tancredi · Oper Köln

Jun 20 - Jul 4, 2026

Night dreams · Opernhaus Zürich

Past events

4 - 23 Apr, 2026

The Butterfly Effect · Opernhaus Zürich

Mar 27 - May 2, 2026

Scylla and Glaucus · Opernhaus Zürich

About

Martin Gebhardt hasn't added a bio