Name: Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
Start: 2025-07-26T20:00:00
Location: Deutsche Oper Berlin

Deutsche Oper Berlin's 2025 season is set to captivate audiences with an eclectic blend of traditional opera, innovative performances, and educational insights. From Mozart's enigmatic 'The Magic Flute' to the avant-garde 'Lash' by Rebecca Saunders, the season promises to engage both the heart and mind. Join us as we delve into the fascinating world of opera, jazz, and beyond, where each performance offers a unique narrative brought to life by talented artists and creative minds.

Exploring the Rich Tapestry of Deutsche Oper Berlin's 2025 Season

Markus Brück

Thomas Cilluffo

Nikolai Schukoff

Padraic Rowan

Annette Dasch

Evelyn Herlitzius

Kieran Carrel

Artur Garbas

Stefan Klingele

Katrin Wittig

Benedikt von Peter

Geraldine Arnold

Benjamin Schultz

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Chorus of the 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

Following on from Puccini’s LA RONDINE and Johann Strauss’s DIE FLEDERMAUS, Rolando Villazón returns to the Deutsche Oper Berlin to tackle one of the great comedies of the bel canto genre and demonstrate that he can do humour. L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI remains one of the most popular works by Gioacchino Rossini, who is said to have dashed the piece off in less than a month and was a tender 21 years of age when the opera premiered at Venice’s Teatro San Benedetto in 1813. It’s a testament to Rossini’s boldness that he chose material that had been set to music only a few years before by his more experienced colleague Luigi Mosca. His audacity paid off, with the subsequent triumph bringing him immediate fame across Italy and widespread popularity soon afterwards throughout Europe.

L’Italiana in Algeri

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

RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY in Benedikt von Peter's production will take place in the foyers and on the stage - guests can move freely between the venues and video screens. There will be free choice of seating, including on mattresses.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

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