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

Staatsoper Stuttgart is set to dazzle audiences with a diverse lineup of operas from classic masterpieces to innovative productions. The program features iconic works like 'Don Giovanni' and 'Madama Butterfly', alongside unique creations such as 'The Red Whale' and 'Casanova'. This season promises to be a thrilling exploration of human emotions, cultural intersections, and artistic brilliance, with talented performers and visionary directors bringing these stories to life on stage.

Opera Extravaganza: A Journey Through Timeless Tales and Modern Interpretations

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

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

Stuttgart Opera

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.

Dialogues des Carmélites

“Exuberant, loud and over-the-top: it’s showtime in the orchestra pit“, as one journalist put it after the premiere in December 2024. And the stage design and costumes continue the theme – albeit with slightly ironic opulence. Casanova is the title of a revue operetta by composers Johann Strauss and Ralph Benatzky. Eric Charell, the “revue king“ of his time, staged the world premiere at Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin in 1928. However, the real hero of the Stuttgart production is not so much Casanova himself, but the character of Barberina, who is embodied on stage by two different artists. She takes over the show and leads us through an evening which centers also on female desire and the lustful play with identities and images of masculinity, femininity and the in-between.

Casanova

Two movie scenes, as legendarily funny as they are gently melancholy: Charlie Chaplin as a tramp eating his shoe. And the iconic dance of two buns impaled on forks. The Gold Rush, Chaplin’s silent film from 1925, tells of the feverish search for gold in Alaska at the end of the 19th century, as well as of unrequited love, friendship, brutality – and ultimately also of happiness in life. After Modern Times and City Lights, Cornelius Meister and the Staatsorchester Stuttgart continue their Chaplin silent film cycle with The Gold Rush, bringing the Hollywood sound directly back to the Littmann-Bau. Chaplin composed the music himself and also includes classics such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, Wagner’s “Oh, du mein holder Abendstern“ and Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz. A film experience with live music as a third dimension.

The Gold Rush

“I don’t believe in the right to work; I prefer to believe that the greatest right of man is to do nothing,“ said Rossini. Angelina, his Cinderella, is far from that – she performs slave labour in her bankrupt stepfather’s family. How a prince, for whom the bank account and an army of servants work, gets her out of this precarious situation is a world-famous fairy tale from Charles Perrault to Disney. Rossini tells the story of the power of honest feelings to survive without the well-known miraculous elements, but there is one great miracle: love at first sight. Not at the ball, but when the prince, as a servant, inspects the potential brides in advance. Surrounding this is the madness of exalted dreams of ascent and terrible scenarios of descent, which drives Rossini’s characters forward just as much as the insane energy of his music. The young mezzo-soprano Itzeli del Rosario, who is a member of the Stuttgart ensemble since this season, makes her debut in the title role of Cinderella.

La Cenerentola

Which sounds evoke feelings of home in us? What music do we associate with the places where we have lived our lives? Can a rummaged-out LP sleeve, a cassette box, an aging CD bring memories to life across countries and generations? With questions like these in mind, Croatian composer Sara Glojnarić started a “sound archive of the future“ two years ago as a collection of material for her compositions. In personal conversations and listening sessions with people who have settled in the Stuttgart area since the 1950s, she has since uncovered long-forgotten memories and created an intergenerational songbook of the city: “I want to start where the history books stop – to tell the story in all its splendor, humor and realness. From the perspective of an insider who understands this very special feeling of an emotional balancing act between what we call home and where we are now.“ In a team with Bosnian writer Tanja Šljivar and director Anika Rutkofsky, Glojnarić weaves these immigration stories full of nostalgia and dreams, tragedy and comedy, rituals and linguistic diversity into a poetic-surreal mixtape opera. Together, they take us on a kind of road trip along the former Europastraße 5, a nightly transit route that forms a bridge between the cultural identities of Germany and south-eastern Europe and at the same time symbolizes the longing for belonging. An opera about the timeless utopian power of music as cultural memory. An opera about Stuttgart and from Stuttgart, composed for the state orchestra and ensemble of the Staatsoper Stuttgart, including Goran Jurić and Diana Haller, whose personal musical memories of the journey to Stuttgart will be experienced on stage as flashbacks.

Station Paradiso

“Al’alba vincerò - at sunrise I will win“, the unknown prince bawls out to the city, making him one of the few heroes of Italian opera whose arioso sleeplessness is due to confidence rather than despair. The others have to despair instead. Primarily the inhabitants of the city, in which – “nessun dorma“ – no one is allowed to sleep because everyone has to search for the name of the unknown man on the highest orders and under threat of the death penalty. That Turandot should actually end well by Puccini’s standards can be felt – like so much else – in the central tenor aria of the work. Puccini knew better than anyone how to force an emotional involvement on the audience through the merciless immediacy of his musical language. The piece itself ends happily, albeit without Puccini, who had to lay down his arms in his battle against laryngeal cancer before the finale was finished. And so Turandot joins the ranks of the great opera fragments of the 20th century. But not only is the piece more or less a chimera, the title character herself also seems to be primarily a projection: “Turandot does not exist! Only nothingness exists“, Ping, Pang and Pong warn the unknown prince to prevent him from attempting the three riddles that need to be solved in order to win the emperor’s daughter Turandot. Anna Sophie Mahler, whose Stuttgart production of Saint François d’Assise 2023 was named the “most unusual opera experience of the year“ by the journal Opernwelt, will set out 100 years after the premiere of Puccini’s enigmatic last opera in search of the “fluid of love“ with which the composer wanted to pacify nerves stretched to the limit in the opera’s finale. Because, this much is certain: this fluidum would also be useful today.

Turandot

In his opera Rossini brought together a string of well-known “commedia dll’arte” characters of which he formed an irresistible comedy – full of intrigue and charade: the mercenary guardian Doctor Bartolo and his conniving henchman Basilio, his wealthy charge Rosina and her secret lover Lindoro (alias Count Almaviva) and finally the barber Figaro himself, who assists the young couple in the pursuit of their love against all odds. The opera’s world premiere in 1816 was accompanied by boos and catcalls – only to get firmly established in the world of opera shortly after. Rossini’s work by now has developed into one of the most popular and most frequently played operas world-wide.

Il barbiere di Siviglia

The Littmann Sessions are entering their third round – again with regional pop acts on stage of the opera house! In cooperation with the Pop-Büro, the JOiN-Haus, our joint project with the Schmetterlingshaus, and the Stadtgesellschaft, we are once again filling the opera house with exciting new sounds.

The Littmann-Sessions: a pop gala

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

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