Name: The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
Start: 2025-04-27T16:00:00
Location: Deutsche Oper Berlin

The Deutsche Oper Berlin is set to stage an impressive lineup of operatic masterpieces, featuring timeless classics like Georges Bizet's 'Carmen', Richard Wagner's 'Tannhäuser', and Giuseppe Verdi's 'Aida'. As diverse interpretations and powerful performances bring these works to life, audiences can expect a riveting experience that delves into themes of love, redemption, and societal reflections. This season's productions offer an opportunity to witness the compelling narratives, nuanced characters, and musical brilliance that have cemented these operas as cultural treasures.

Exploring The Timeless Allure of Opera at Deutsche Oper Berlin

Deutsche Oper Berlin invites opera enthusiasts to an exciting 2024/2025 season, featuring a diverse lineup from the passionate depths of 'Carmen' to the transcendent strains of 'The Flying Dutchman.' Bringing together iconic operas and renowned performers, this season promises to be a testament to the power of music and storytelling. With interpretations that challenge societal norms and offer profound emotional journeys, each performance is set to captivate audiences and offer new perspectives on timeless tales.

A Journey Through Opera: Exploring Deutsche Oper Berlin's 2024/2025 Season

Jared Werlein

Annika Schlicht

Joel Allison

Tobias Kehrer

Gideon Poppe

Philipp Jekal

Chance Jonas-O'Toole

Michael Bachtadze

Jörg Schörner

Clemens Bieber

Burkhard Ulrich

Elena Tsallagova

Albert Pesendorfer

Thomas Johannes Mayer

Simon Pauly

Ulf Schirmer

Anna Viebrock

Jeremy Bines

Jossi Wieler

Sergio Morabito

Olaf Freese

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin

Deutsche Oper Berlin

As in all operas by Puccini, TOSCA is an illustration of how human attentiveness and pleasures of the palate can be mutually dependent if the composer’s artistic intentions become a benchmark for directorial interpretation. Puccini’s humane attentiveness is essentially dependent on an outcry and/or a sense of resignation. The pity inherent in his music does not content itself with abstract gestures; it wants to unsettle, to bring about change. Out of the “small things” named by Puccini as the source of his inspiration and the focus of his music “big things” grow – as long as we want them. Puccini’s choice of material owes something, directly or indirectly, to the spirit of Zola, Gorki and Hauptmann, and the link between that material and his compositional style places him likewise as a direct descendant of Verdi and an exponent of verismo. He was also known as an admirer of Wagner, although a Wagner imitator he assuredly was not.

Tosca

Discover the world of dance from a different perspective! In the Forum discussion series, Dramaturge Katja Wiegand delves into pressing societal questions and their connections to dance. Together with experts from other artistic disciplines, academia, and practice, the 2025/26 season once again fosters interdisciplinary exchange. Using pieces from the current repertoire as examples, the series highlights the intersection of dance with cultural and social themes. This season’s focus is on the captivating world of collections, archives, and artistic styles in dance.

Forum

The multi-award-winning ballet Nureyev, staged by visionary director Kirill Serebrennikov, premiered in December 2017 at Moscow’s world-renowned Bolshoi Theatre, attracting international attention even before its debut. Now, the Staatsballett Berlin brings this extraordinary production to the stage for the first time outside Russia. With music composed by Ilya Demutsky and choreography by Yuri Possokhov, this grand-scale production blends ballet, opera, and drama, incorporating a large ensemble to create a powerful tribute to the life and career of Rudolf Nureyev, one of the greatest dancers of the 20th century. Renowned for his artistic brilliance and his bold defiance of societal and political boundaries, Nureyev became an icon in both the ballet world and the broader arts scene.

Nureyev

Drawing loosely on motifs from Christianity, Buddhism, assorted legends and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Richard Wagner eventually completed a myth of his own, PARSIFAL. The work that he dubbed a “stage-hallowing play” tells the story of a “pure fool” who is blissfully unaware of his own nature and calling. Parsifal sallies forth into the ascetic brotherhood of the Knights of the Grail and into another very different world, that of Klingsor’s erotically charged garden, where a kiss from Kundry infuses him with an enlightenment that leads him to release Amfortas, the King of the Grail, from his suffering and redeem the brotherhood.

Parsifal

No other work reflects Puccini's search for new forms of musical theatre like his three-act trilogy IL TRITTICO, which premiered in 1918. In three pieces with different colours and temperatures, he once again brought to the stage what Italian opera could be in those years. In a condensed version, the second and third parts of the triptych now return to the stage of the Deutsche Oper in Karabulut's colourful production: SUOR ANGELICA, a piece with an all-female cast, is unique in opera history and revolves around questions of life and death and the possibilities in between. In her feminist interpretation, Karabulut explores the possibilities of (female) self-determination within a closed system. GIANNI SCHICCHI, on the other hand, follows the tradition of commedia dell'arte, placing humans at the centre as players and greedy deceivers. With her keen sense of timing and a captivating ensemble, Karabulut reveals the bizarre depths of a hypocritical family gathering once again around the deathbed of their patriarch.

Suor Angelica / Gianni Schicchi

In its new series of jazz events in the Tischlerei the Big Band of the Deutsche Oper Berlin presents six themed concerts featuring smaller formations of the Big Band and guests. The concerts focus on a particular subject or composer, amalgamating music and poetry. Texts, biographical information, poetry and background information on the evening’s unifying theme combine to produce a unique experience for the audience.

Jazz & Lyrics III: Hymn to Freedom

Moral outrage one moment, coquettish expediency the next. The intrigues of the powerful interwoven with the desperation of hapless refugees. When it comes to the gamut of human emotion and modes of behaviour, few operas of the baroque period can touch Handel’s GIULIO CESARE IN EGITTO, which premiered in London in 1724. This tale of the love affair between the ageing Roman general Julius Caesar and the young pharaoh Cleopatra was one of Handel’s greatest triumphs within his lifetime and remains his most performed opera. That is not just down to the base material – one of the best-known historically attested love stories, which has been given treatments ranging from Shakespeare to Liz Taylor and Richard Burton and “Asterix und Cleopatra” – but also to a sophisticated libretto that provided the inspiration for a string of great arias and memorable character studies, for aside from the Roman-Egyptian pairing of Caesar and Cleopatra GIULIO CESARE IN EGITTO features another pair who are busy not with flirting but with the serious business of staying alive: Cornelia, the widow of Pompeius, a murdered rival of Caesar, and her son Sesto. Both have sought refuge in Egypt but have become pawns in the scheming between Cleopatra and her brother Tolomeo.

Giulio Cesare in Egitto

Scarcely any other work of world literature breathes music in the same manner as William Shakespeare's “A Midsummer Night's Dream”. Elves dance through the night in the summery enchanted forest and sing the fairy queen Titania to sleep. Music accompanies the wedding celebration of the royal couple Hippolyta and Theseus, as well as the young lovers Hermia and Lysander, and Helena and Demetrius – when they have finally found each other in the midsummer's night after an erotic cycle of desire and disappointment, of confusion and disarray. And music rings out in the crassly humourous game in the play “Pyramus and Thisbe”, performed by six "highly skilled" craftsmen.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Composers throughout the centuries have expressed their relationship with nature and its creatures in music. How do we listen to this music today, in times of climate crisis and mass extinction, and how do younger composers address this topic? Listen to works by Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina, Franz Schubert, Olivier Messiaen and Kaija Saariaho.

Chamber Music V: The sound of the forest – bringing nature to life

Richard Wagner considered RHEINGOLD a "pre-evening" to his stage play DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN, a label that certainly deliberately refers to the prologues of the Baroque operas. Because here, as well as there, the gods are in control and create the conditions under which the fates of man will be decided. And just like the ancient deities of Monteverdi, their northern counterparts of Wagner are beings who embody the drives of human existence. All of the feelings, urges and thoughts that determine our own existence also appear in the two and a half hours of RHEINGOLD. Starting with the innocent games played by the Rheinmaidens whom the Nibelung Alberich robs of their gold, to this dwarf's unbridled lust for power and the scornful nihilism of the fire god Loge, to the father of the gods Wotan's attempt to create something that will last with his palace of Valhalla. And not lastly, the gold itself is a mute lead character: an item of gleaming fascination, it is simultaneously a touchstone by which each character is manifest and which divides gods and man alike into good and evil.

Der Ring des Nibelungen – Das Rheingold

With the hegemony of the gods at its zenith at the close of THE RHINEGOLD and the gods ensconced in the castle of Valhalla, trouble is brewing in THE VALKYRIE. The mortals are power-crazed, mistrust and materialism rule and all that the gods can think about is enforcing the old codes rather than questioning their raison d’être. Siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde are condemned to death because there is no place for their special brand of love in society. Brünnhilde, a Valkyrie, is charmed by them and dares to defy her father Wotan’s sentence by taking the pair under her wing. In THE VALKYRIE Wagner makes it plain whose side he is on: in the big love scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde, in which the elemental force of love outpunches all social mores, and in the evolution of Brünnhilde’s character, whose conduct is at first motivated by intuitive sympathy but morphs into deliberate action as a protest against inhumanity and injustice.

Der Ring des Nibelungen – Die Walküre

Three norns are sitting at the foot of the world tree, spinning, knotting and severing the threads of life and thus determining the fates of individual mortals. They give life, fashion its course and bring it to an end. As do their mythological sister figures in other cultures, these Germanic goddesses of fate wield the power of life and death over human beings. In our secularised times death is now the No.1 taboo subject, and to temper the awfulness of it all, we make it our personal business to delay its arrival by cultivating “good” habits and living healthily. We make it our mission in life to fend off our own decay and arrest the ageing process.

Finite

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

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