Name: The First People
Start: 2025-12-12T19:30:00
Location: Oper Frankfurt

Ian Koziara

Ambur Braid

Sebastian Weigle

Iain MacNeil

Andreas Bauer Kanabas

Rainer Sellmaier

Tobias Kratzer

Joachim Klein

Oper Frankfurt

The last hours of the singer Flora Tosca and artist Mario Cavaradossi's passionate love: they couldn’t escape the vortex of power and violence. Their attempts to break free from the unscrupulous Police Chief Scarpia’s system were in vain. The strength in Puccini’s opera lies in striking portrayals of extreme emotions, violence, jealousy and persecution. The composer decided on this work while watching a performance of Victorien Sardou’s play, with Sarah Bernhardt as Tosca. His music lives in the keenly sketched characters, their outpourings contrasting with lyrical moments. Director Andreas Kriegenburg homed in on their private lives, while liberating the characters from clichés: they could be people of today, broken by a brutal police state. Strong visual effects and detailed portraits of the three key protagonists turn his production into a study of the abuse of power and resistance.

Tosca

Mozart and his librettist, and kindred spirit, Lorenzo da Ponte’s third opera revolves around six people. The lives of two couples are thrown into confusion in the space of 24 hours: Guglielmo and Ferrando are persuaded to make a bet with cynical Don Alfonso about their lovers’ Fiordiligi and Dorabella’s fidelity. Don Alfonso’s convinced that, with their maid Despina's help, he can prove both sisters are fickle. The young men dress up as foreigners, to seduce their best friend’s lovers. Feigned and real emotions start getting all mixed up. The »wrong« couples even celebrate a sham double wedding, before the sisters discover their husbands' true identities. All six draw seemingly happy and conciliatory conclusions, but the laughter sticks in their throats. Can things return to how they were? Which feelings were and are real anyway?

Così fan tutte

Jacques Offenbach carries us off to a world of bandits in his wonderful operetta. Falsacappa, their chief, is having trouble keeping his men’s moral up: recent forays raked in next to nothing. Now he’s planning an outrageous coup. Taking advantage of complicated events concerning an envoy from Granada, wanting to claim a debt from the court of Mantua, and sneaking into Mantua, is disguise, to swipe the money for themselves. The carabinieri, in their heavy boots, always arrive too late. But Falsacappa's gang ends up empty-handed: the Duke of Mantua's coffers are empty … criminal activity at court far outclasses the bandits’.

The Bandits

In his »erotic mystery/enigma« Otto Borngräber envisaged the first people driven out of paradise as a nuclear family left to their own devices: Chawa longs for her husband to want her as he used to, but Adahm’s more concerned about eking out an existence. Their pubescent son Kajin charges around in the wilderness looking for a woman, while his brother Chabel seeks redemption by praying to a God. When Kajin catches his mother and Chabel in ecstatic union, he kills his brother, then sees the »future blood of future mankind« in a terrifying vision.

The First People

Little ones will probably never forget being so close to a handful of singers and musicians performing for them, live, that going to an opera when they're bigger will be something to really look forward to.

Opera for Children

Neue Kaiser

Elderly King Mitridate wants to marry again, but suspects his sons might dispute his right to his beloved Aspasia and the throne. He therefore spreads the rumour that he died in battle after being defeated by the Romans. Sure enough, his older son Farnace starts pressurising his father’s young intended bride to marry him. But Aspasia secretly loves Sifare, his younger brother, who she asks to protect her from Farnace’s advances. The King of Pontus, believed to be dead, returns in the company of Irene, whom Farnace once promised to marry. Everyone starts eyeing each up other suspiciously. Farnace, in league with the Romans, plots against his father while Sifare und Aspasia are torn between their love for one another and loyalty to Mitridate. Left at the mercy of the King’s jealousy, their desperation brings them close to death.

Mitridate, Re di Ponto

Harrison Birtwistle’s opera ain’t for the fainthearted. A man throws a baby in the fire, stabs his wife Judy, searching for lovely Polly, who he wants to marry, carrying out further murders before he finally finds her. Benjamin Britten proposed the young composer Birtwistle for an opera commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival, because »he’s got more to say than his contemporaries«.

Punch and Judy

Bockenheimer Depot

She lives in the here and now, one of the best-known heroines in operatic history, she makes sergeant Don José lose his mind, throwing his life into confusion. His attempts to make her tow the line fail because she can’t be tied down. They gradually drive each other into corners. Bizet’s music brings the differences in their perceptions of love and relationships into contrast again and again: Their downfall starts with light-hearted operetta music, but ends in tragedy. Barrie Kosky’s production quickly achieved cult status after it blasted onto the stage in  2015, and has lost none of its impact, taking the most performed opera in the world back to its roots - Opéra comique. The story’s interspersed and told using concise texts, steering us towards its tragic end. En route, romantic, amusing moments and wonderful dance routines share the stage. Kosky’s vision is fascinating, toying masterfully with usual Carmen and Spanish clichés.

Carmen

who's music's being performed for the first time in this series of concerts, presented by the conductor Anja Bihlmaier. Grażyna Bacewicz, who was born in Poland, was a violinist, pianist and composer who taught at various conservatoires and wrote stories and books – an all-rounder and important representative of Polish music. Her concerto for strings draws an arc from neo-baroque to neo-classic, but is unmistakably 20th century music.

4th Sunday & Monday Symphonic Concerts

Alte Oper

Franz-Josef Selig, with his sonorous bass voice, is one of the best loved and known representatives of his fach, much in demand for his wonderful portrayals of characters including Gurnemanz, King Marke, Sarastro, Rocco, Osmin and Fiesco which he performs regularly at places including the Salzburg, Bayreuth and Aix-en-Provence festivals, the Bavarian and Vienna state operas, La Scala Milan and Metropolitan Opera in New York, working with conductors such as Christian Thielemann, Sir Simon Rattle and Zubin Mehta. Now he's back at  Oper Frankfurt, where he sang Gurnemanz in Wagner's Parsifal in 2019, to give his second recital here with Gerold Huber (the first was in 2014). We look forward to welcoming these two exceptional musicians back to the house!

Franz-Josef Selig (bass) & Gerold Huber (piano)

See in the New Year in a relaxed atmosphere in Oper Frankfurt's wonderful foyer, with buffet, drinks, a DJ and dancing! Come and have a ball!

New Year's Eve at Oper Frankfurt

This petite American soprano with an enormous voice is back in Frankfurt, where she thrilled audiences in recent seasons as Tchaikovsky's Iolanta and Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, for this recital. Recent opportunities for her versatile abilities to shine included appearances at the Aix-en-Provence Festival,  where she can be heard again soon in a Gluck double-bill as young Iphigenie in Aulis and the older Iphigenie auf Tauris. She sang the title role in Janáček's Katja Kabanová, one of her finest roles, at the Salzburg Festival (get the DVD), in Munich, Stuttgart, Rome, Geneva, Brno and Seattle. Get a copy of her debut CD:Canción amorosa - with Lieder from Spain. She's putting together a special programme for Frankfurt, inspired by Nadezhda von Meck (1831 - 1894), a Russian amateur musician and valued confidante and patron of Tchaikovsky and Debussy, who also influenced Janáček and Glière.