Name: The Red Whale
Start: 2026-01-22T19:30:00
Location: Stuttgart Opera

Matthias Klink

Josefin Feiler

Deborah Saffery

Noam Heinz

Marit Strindlund

Madina Frey

Yunus Schahinger

Sarah-Katharina Karl

Martin G. Berger

Rainer Eisenbraun

Alexander Djurkov Hotter

Staatsoper Stuttgart

"I no longer have time to think about myself. In no year have I worked as much mentally as in this one," wrote the composer Leoš Janáček while he was working on The Cunning Little Vixen . The composition absorbed him completely, so meticulously did he try to translate the sounds of nature and the animal world into music. Janáček got the inspiration for the story about a young vixen who comes into contact with the human world from a newspaper comic. Nevertheless, The Cunning Little Vixen is not a playful fairytale opera, on the contrary. Two worlds collide, that of the animals and that of the humans. The community around the forester and his family as well as the other villagers is cruel and at the same time full of longing for a better life - but who has the answer to the question of what a real life is like? When the forester and the vixen meet in the forest, nature and apparent civilization come face to face. Thus, The Cunning Little Vixen explicitly shows no cute anecdotes about animals, but a pragmatic, uncompromising world in which it is all about survival. And yet there is room for the love between vixen and fox. Janáček succeeds in sounding out the animal in man and the human in the animal, thus holding up a mirror to us. Almost 101 years to the day after its premiere in Brno in 1924, Stephan Kimmig now turns his attention to an opera full of contrasts and the longing to find a place where one can live free of rules, following Der Prinz von Homburg and Das Rheingold . But does this place even exist?

The Cunning Little Vixen

Stuttgart Opera

Who has not heard of the robber Hotzenplotz? He first steals grandmother's new coffee grinder which plays such beautiful music whilst grinding. Then Hotzenplotz lures Seppel and Kasperl into a trap, taking them both prisoners. What’s more, the villain then sells poor Kasperl to the great and evil magician Petrosilius Zwackelmann – or is it Seppel he is selling? It does not matter. In any case, it takes a fair amount of courage, magic and the combined help by the audience to rescue the two friends. Composer Sebastian Schwab has newly composed Otfried Preußler's enchanting story as a Singspiel for the ensemble of the Staatsoper Stuttgart in time for Preußler’s 100th birthday - with coffee grinder and, of course, 7 knives.

The Robber Hotzen­plotz

Sometimes it’s time to throw a party! With this music theatre creation, Eric Gauthier invites you to celebrate with us and explore why we humans actually celebrate. To this end, he brings a celebration to the stage with singers and dancers, the Staatsopernchor and the Staatsorchester. To be more precise, many celebrations: La Fest is a journey through the various festive occasions in a person’s life, full of memories of dinner parties, birthdays and dancing through wedding nights, of surprise guests and inevitable farewells. The celebrations of a life as opera. Or the other way round: opera as a celebration of life, its highs and lows. And an embrace of its transience. No celebration without music: Benjamin Bayl has put together a diverse mix of arias, choirs and dances from over 200 years of baroque music. Let’s celebrate!

The Fest

“Lie to me, I promise, I’ll believe”. Is a seducer always a cheat? Or is he himself being cheated on in return? Don Giovanni is the incarnation of the irresistible lover; a man who lightheartedly rushes from one conquest to another, who refuses to submit to any kind of moral claims on his person and who pays for his freedom with an incapability of forming an honest relationship with a woman or another person. Even his numerous mistresses are not really in love with Don Giovanni himself, but only make use of him as a mirrored image to project their own different needs.

Don Giovanni

In 1853, the US battle fleet forced Japan to open its ports and enter into business with America. “The vigorous pressing of America’s handshake given kindly, but offered with zeal and capable of both striking and embracing at the same time – rocked the isolation of the Japanese and made them sensitive for their relationship towards the rest of the world“, according to the recollection of Captain M. C. Perry, then commander of the fleet. Puccini himself never visited Japan, but with his “Japanese tragedy“ about the geisha Cio-Cio-San and her love for American Naval officer Pinkerton, he created an affecting testimony for any form of one-sided cultural transfer. By choosing the “American way of life“ Cio-Cio-San accepts a cut-off from her past and her cultural traditions, but is left behind, pregnant and full of hope for the future which is finally cruelly dashed.

Madama Butterfly

When the beach lies beneath the pavement, as the ‘68ers’ liked to say, it's not far to the sea. Gladis, the protagonist of this opera, follows the opposite direction, from the sea to the pavement. Gladis is an orca. And she wants to destroy what she destroys. Cruise ships, superyachts, that sort of thing. Not just in the sea, but also on land. And so she takes up an offer and sells one of her fins for 24 hours of human form. Der rote Wal (The Red Whale) is a fairy tale that approaches a Stuttgart material that is charged like a myth. A “German autumn fairy tale“ about the myth of the RAF, about the question of what resistance is allowed and also about what was and what is true.

The Red Whale

Silent night at the opera house? Not this year. On Christmas Day, the Littmann Building will be shaking as Die Nerven take the stage – hailed by taz as “the best live band in the country.” For this year’s Homecoming Concert, the Esslingen-born trio returns (almost) to where it all began. Forget candlelight and carols – this Christmas night is all about raw energy and noise.

Homecoming Concert

A coming of age story and a story of love: The Queen of the Night persuades Prince Tamino to rescue her daughter Pamina from captivity under the high priest Sarastro. Tamino, who instantly falls in love with Pamina, is ready to set off. Involuntarily, bird catcher Papageno is also sent along with Tamino – as companion to the prince. After various trials of initiation, courage and perseverance Tamino and Papageno not only find their station in life as adults, but also each the woman to their hearts’ content: Tamino gains the hand of Pamina and Papageno lives happily ever after with his Papagena. We show the legendary Magic Flute of the Komische Oper Berlin, which director Barrie Kosky staged with the theater video art collective "1927" in an astonishing video animation world for the whole family.

The Magic Flute

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

“Et si je t'aime, prends garde à toi – if I love you, take care,” sings Carmen in her world-famous Habanera. Love is a game to her, or at least a rebellious bird. Lively, perhaps capricious, but fun. Don José's love, on the other hand, is really dangerous – not a game, but deadly serious. If I love you, beware: not a flirtation, a threat. Sebastian Nübling's production shows Carmen as a gripping journey into the subconscious of a murderer, far removed from all Spanish clichés. With audience favorite Atalla Ayan as Don José and the Carmen debut of Ida Ränzlöv.

Carmen

The acclaimed production by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito returns — a staging that delves deep into the supposedly superficial characters. The story of Amina, a sleepwalker wrongly accused of betrayal, is brought to life by a bel canto dream cast featuring Helene Schneiderman, Catriona Smith, Charles Sy, and Claudia Muschio.

La sonnambula

“No human dies for himself alone. One dies for others. Maybe some die instead of others. Who knows?“ (Sœur Constance in Dialogues des Carmélites). Few operas focus on the confrontation with one’s own mortality as much as Francis Poulenc’s opera about an order of Carmelite nuns in the turmoil of the French Revolution, which premiered in 1957. The story revolves around the young Blanche, who – plagued by severe anxiety since birth – finds shelter in a convent. But the time of security ends abruptly when the Revolutionary Committee breaks up the convent and forbids the community from practicing its rites. The sisters swear themselves to martyrdom, but Blanche’s fear of death drives her to flee. Eventually she manages to overcome herself: As she follows her sisters to the scaffold, her fear is extinguished in the face of death. In her production of this hybrid of thriller, discourse opera and holy mass, director Ewelina Marciniak, known for her feminist readings, focuses on the dynamics of a community of women struggling for communication and humanity in the midst of terror. And even if the supernatural “Salve Regina“ of the Carmelite nuns on the scaffold leaves no doubt that this opera is a fervent profession of faith by the Catholic Poulenc, the nuns’ willingness to make sacrifices raises questions: where are the boundaries between solidarity, faith and fundamentalism? How lonely is it to die in our secularized contemporary world? Under the musical direction of Cornelius Meister, Poulenc’s powerful music becomes a unique event.