Name: Music Circus
Start: 2027-06-12T14:00:00
Location: Deutsche Oper Berlin

Titus Engel

Deutsche Oper Berlin

It’s the most performed opera in the German-speaking region, an unusual – and masterly – blend of Viennese folk theatre and fairy tale, mythology and freemasonry mystique: Mozart’s THE MAGIC FLUTE remains a puzzle to this day. Did Mozart and his librettist Schikaneder switch horses from the Queen of the Night to Sarastro half way through? Is the message not one of distrust towards a supposedly infallible priesthood and its simplistic good-versus-evil ideology? Are some Mozart experts right when they talk of a disconnect between text and music? Whatever the answer, it’s the music that allows us to relate to the story’s contradictions. Far from denouncing the characters, it confers an existentiality on their conflicts.

The Magic Flute

Georges Bizet’s titular heroine is as captivating a character as any in the history of opera. The different interpretations of Carmen are legion: we have the seductress, the personification of forbidden yearning, the standard bearer for the “eternally female” in the brutal battle of the sexes, the anarchist unfettered by bourgeois angst and compulsions, the archaic clairvoyante seeing her own death in the cards - yet free, as she does not dread her destiny. Few opera heroines are so open to interpretation and hence so able to serve as a mirror held up to society.

Carmen

A nation is cowed by its princess. Turandot, beautiful and fascinating representative of a royal dynasty, presides over a gruesome ritual: only her marriage to a suitor will bring an end to the violence, but no would-be bridegroom has yet managed to solve the riddles. The same old spectacle plays out, ending in yet another execution, until Calaf, the son of a deposed ruler from a foreign land, unexpectedly answers the riddles correctly. He then turns the tables on Turandot, forcing her to answer his own question if she wants to steal out of her obligation. Puccini’s times are changing rapidly, the art world is going through drastic transformation and new, abstract forms are being coined to reflect modern-day experience. And the composer, in his early 60s, is again trying to break new ground.

Turandot

The multi-award-winning ballet Nureyev, choreographed by Yuri Possokhov, composed by Ilya Demutsky and staged by visionary director Kirill Serebrennikov, premiered in December 2017 at Moscow’s world-famous Bolshoi Theatre. Even before its debut, the work caused a stir internationally. Now, the Staatsballett Berlin is bringing this extraordinary production to the stage for the first time outside Russia.

Nureyev

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

The two middle sections of the tetralogy set out two ways of experiencing life. On the one hand we are presented in THE VALKYRIE with Brünnhilde, whose maturation process takes her from her discovery of sorrow and empathy to a conscious reflection on what it is to be human. By contrast, Siegfried’s path is mapped out solely as a function of his sensory experience. Where initially the young man’s self-image stems only from his exploration of his own boundless strength, other senses and sensibilities soon come to bear, along with an awakening sexuality. SIEGFRIED presents an encounter not only between man and woman but between two principles – Siegfried’s innate, unquestioned vigour on one side and Brünnhilde’s wisdom born of observation on the other. And as these two diametrical forces unite in a love clinch, the end of the opera seems to be presenting the basis for a renewal of human society.

Der Ring des Nibelungen – Siegfried

The final part of the tetralogy sees another broadening of the horizon. Siegfried sallies forth »to new glories«, encountering people driven by a desire for power and riches and without scruple in their determination to acquire them. Without Brünnhilde on hand to help him, the hero succumbs to a conspiracy at the Gibichung hall, also triggering the beginning of the end of the old world, which is still beset by the curse placed by Alberich in THE RHINEGOLD on the ring, which confers great power on its wearer. With Brünnhilde realising what has happened, she sees self-sacrifice as the only path to redemption: by eradicating herself through immolation and returning the stolen gold to the Rhine, she will be clearing the way for a new beginning for all. From Brünnhilde’s ashes Wagner rekindles the love theme, which until then has only been played in Act 3 of THE VALKYRIE. This charges the final moments of TWILIGHT OF THE GODS with an atmosphere of hope rather than simply the gloom of destruction. The game can begin again; will it take a different course next time?

Der Ring des Nibelungen – Götterdämmerung

Few works have slipped from the programmes of German-language opera houses to the extent experienced by the operas of Albert Lortzing. Where works such as THE POACHER, THE ARMOURER and UNDINE were still fixtures in the repertoire only thirty years ago, they have now all but vanished from the calendars of theatre venues. Not even Lortzing’s greatest triumph, his comedy of errors CSAR AND CARPENTER (1837), has escaped the neglect – and this despite old chestnuts like the “Clog Dance” and the aria “Lebe wohl, mein flandrisch Mädchen.” Doubly surprising if you consider that this tale of Tsar Peter the Great, who strikes up a friendship with an army deserter with the exact same name while acquiring the skills of a carpenter incognito in a Dutch shipyard, was arguably one of the best musical comedies of its time, with Lortzing’s protagonists retaining all their relatable flaws and yearnings in the face of all their ups and downs. The young deserter, who just wants a quiet life, the feisty Marie, who’s determined to decide her own path, the Tsar with his thinly veiled leanings to violent domination, and van Bett as the mayor and a loveable caricature of a German bigwig… all these characters confer a timeless humanity on the comedy.

Csar and Carpenter

John Cage founded the Music Circus in 1967, a musical «happening» in which any number of artists appear in one place at the same time. It is an anarchistic community composition where nobody directs and nobody is at the forefront. The audience itself decides what to listen to and where to move. Titus Engel brings together amateur musicians and professionals from Deutsche Oper Berlin to embark on this radical experiment. «Just let as many things as possible happen simultaneously,» wrote Cage. No hierarchy. No fixed result. What happens when everyone plays at the same time? A circus of possibilities, or: What does democracy sound like?