Figaro and Susanna, servants at the court of Count Almaviva, are soon to marry and are furnishing the lodgings that they’ve been allotted in the Count’s castle. Figaro is gleefully taking measurements for the conjugal bed, but Susanna is worried: the Count’s passion for his wife has long since cooled, meaning that he might invoke his “right to the first night”. Figaro is determined that it won’t come to that, but another issue is plaguing him too: before lending him a sum of money, Marcellina, the Count’s housekeeper had wrung from him a pledge to marry her if he defaulted, and that time has now come. To complicate matters, in the Countess’s chambers Susanna is asked by the Count’s page, Cherubino, to put in a word for him because he’s been fired for a dalliance with Barbarina, the Count’s gardener’s daughter. The Count enters suddenly and tries to negotiate a tryst with Susanna, forcing Cherubino to hide, whereupon Basilio the music teacher arrives, and finally Figaro. The situation heats up and the only person to keep a handle on things is Susanna.

Le nozze di Figaro

Deutsche Oper Berlin

In the heart of the desert, three fugitive criminals establish the city of Mahagonny. This ‘paradise city’ has its own rules for living life, fueled by the wealth of men passing through from the Gold Coast. Eating, loving, boxing, and drinking are the order of the day. However, this idyllic utopia soon begins to falter, as natural disasters, excesses, violence, and corruption push the city to its breaking point.

Rise and Fall of the City of Maha­gonny

Schiller Theater

Long before Oscar Wilde’s interpretation, the figure of Salome already appeared in the Bible. There, the story was about how King Herod, his stepdaughter Salome, and John the Baptist (Jochanaan) each lose their heads—although in very different ways...

Sa­lo­me

Hansel and Gretel, children of a poor broom maker and his wife, are sent into the woods one day by their mother to pick berries – as punishment for larking around instead of doing their chores. When their father arrives home bearing a bag full of treats after a successful working day, he berates his wife, because the woods are home to an evil witch. The parents set off to look for the kids, who have meanwhile filled their baskets but then eaten all the berries themselves out of sheer hunger. They also realise darkness has fallen and they’re lost, so they lie down for the night and say their prayers, falling asleep and having a strange and wonderful dream. In the morning they wake to see a cottage made of gingerbread and other sweetmeats. Nibbling at the house, they are surprised by the witch, who takes them captive, planning to bake the children in her oven. Instead, they play a trick on her and push her into her own oven. The spell is broken and all the children who had been transformed into gingerbread by the witch regain their human form. The pair’s parents appear and the reunited family returns home.

Hansel and Gretel

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Lieutenant Pinkerton is attached to an American ship currently moored in Nagasaki harbour. He has been courting a 15-year-old geisha girl named Cio-Cio-san, known as Butterfly, who is from a poor but genteel family and takes love very seriously. Pinkerton wants to enter into a “time-limited marriage” – not uncommon between European men and geishas at the time – and is even being helped by Goro, the marriage agent, to find a cottage in which they can spend their honeymoon. The US consul, Sharpless, warns him against such a step, but Pinkerton brushes him off and even toasts the day when he will take an American to be his “real” wife.

Madame Butterfly

It is one of the classics in the Staatsoper’s repertoire: August Everding’s production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The production is unique for its reconstruction of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s 1816 set design for what was then the Berlin Court Opera on Unter den Linden – including the legendary starry sky for the Queen of the Night, which has become an icon of scenography and continues to enchant audiences.

Die Zauberflöte (Everding)

Bebelplatz

The tragic drama of an oppressed person from society’s lower classes: Wozzeck, a hardworking but penniless soldier, is increasingly losing control of his life and his mind. He is seized by increasingly violent psychotic episodes, until in a delusion, he stabs and kills his girlfriend Marie.

Wozzeck

Don Giovanni knows what he wants, how to get it and how to throw an outrageously decadent party. Servant Leporello groans under the seductive arts of his master, as he has to pay for everything afterwards. When Don Giovanni murders the Commendatore in a duel for the honor of his daughter Donna Anna, Leporello has had enough. Don Giovanni likes to seduce, trick and gamble for his life, until he suddenly has to face death young and wild ...

Don Gio­vanni/­Re­qui­em

“Blame it on the champagne, tra la la la la !” That’s the half-truth that the protagonists in Johann Strauss’s THE BAT sign up to at the end of a drink-fuelled night of mistaken identities and erotic escapades. But alcohol is only partly to blame; the confusion is largely due to the wiles of the humiliated Dr Falke, who was once exposed to small-town ridicule dressed in the costume of a bat and is now seizing his chance to avenge himself on his ‘good pal’, bon vivant Gabriel von Eisenstein. And so it is that the maid disguises herself as an actress, the wife as a Hungarian countess and Eisenstein himself as a French marquess and off they trot to Prince Orlofsky’s masked ball. That they end up bewailing their fate in jail early the next morning is less down to champagne than to the natural course of events. In THE BAT Johann Strauss pulled off a work that proved to be the prototypical Viennese operetta, bursting with waltzes and polkas and oozing wicked irony. Inspired by Offenbach’s opéras buffes from Paris, Strauss’s work was merciless in the way it held up a mirror to the bourgeois salon-going public - and many audience members recognised themselves in the absurd antics onstage.

Die Fledermaus

Depending on the demand for their work, the penniless poet Rodolfo and his three witty artist friends live either in destitution or in the lap of luxury, squandering their money. When their neighbour Mimì appears in their garret one day, Rodolfo falls in love with the fragile young woman at first sight. But in the face of Mimì’s illness, the struggling artists are caught up in harsh reality.

La Bohème

It’s a rambunctious tale: an old curmudgeon is set on marrying his own ward of court with a view to snapping up her considerable inheritance. He leaves no stone unturned in his efforts to keep the fair Rosina cloistered from the outside world and thus from any potential young suitors. A pity, then, that Count Almaviva has fallen head over heels for her. Assisted by Figaro, an enterprising barber, he plans to outwit the old man, win over Rosina – and ensure that it’s love that attracts her to him rather than his rank and wealth. Not an easy job for Figaro, seeing as the opposite camp is scheming with equal tenacity … Love wins out in the end, and it turns out that all precautions were useless!

The Barber of Seville

It is common knowledge that Giuseppe Verdi, by nature a critical man, not only found much to disapprove of in the trends of his day but also subjected his own work to a continuous process of editing and revision.

Don Carlo

When the revolutionary and painter Mario Cavaradossi secretly attempts to help a political fugitive to escape the city of Rome, his lover, the famed singer Floria Tosca, believes he is cheating on her with another woman. Her jealousy is exploited by Scarpia, the unscrupulous chief of police, in order to help him capture Cavaradossi. Scarpia then makes Tosca an offer: if she gives herself to him for one night, he will release her lover.

Tosca

With stunning natural imagery and attention to every detail, Barrie Kosky presents Tchaikovsky’s soulful drama about the hopes, longings, and failures of four young people who come to realize in the end that happiness was almost within reach.

Eugene Onegin

Elsa von Brabant is accused of murdering her brother. No one dares prove the young woman’s innocence in this mysterious case. Trapped in a reality that no one seems to share with her, a man enters her life promising to fight for her cause – on one condition: Elsa must trust him blindly and never ask him his name or birthplace.

Lohengrin

The Dutchman is a cursed man, an outsider, a driven individual. Richard Wagner came upon the character of the famous drifter via Heinrich Heine, who lent the Romantic material his typically ironic touch. Wagner’s interest was tweaked not by Heine’s packaging of the story, which relegated the Dutchman-based action to the margins, but by the tale of the enigmatic mariner, which led to him writing his first opera about the man’s quest for a woman who could offer him redemption. The Dutchman, restlessly plying the borderlands between life and death, encounters Senta, who appears equally ill-at-ease and rootless and yearns for a masculine character, the Dutchman, a figment of her imagination.

Der fliegende Holländer

Violetta Valery, living in kept splendour at the expense of Baron Douphol, has apparently recovered from a serious illness. To celebrate, she throws a party where she meets and falls for Alfredo Germont. As their love for each other is frowned upon, they set up house outside of Paris. Alfredo’s father insists that she break with his son in order not to jeopardise the marriage prospects of Alfredo’s sister. Violetta accedes to his wish and cuts off relations. In a showdown at another party Violetta tries to convince Alfredo that she’s in love with the Baron, causing Alfredo to hurl his gambling winnings at her feet, calling them “fees for services rendered”. Soon afterwards, at the height of the Paris carnival, Violetta is on her deathbed. She receives Alfredo, who has heard from his father her real reason for leaving him. Violetta forgives him, gives him her blessing and dies.

La traviata

With the world premiere of his one-act opera, VIOLANTA, the 18-year-old Erich Wolfgang Korngold shifted overnight from child prodigy to one of the leading opera composers of his generation. For VIOLANTA not only heralded the arrival of a young maestro who was as independent as he was variegated in his musical palette, who had an unerring feel for how to render his vision on stage, and who could write melodies that were both expressive and catchy to boot; the 75-minute work to a libretto by Hans Müller, later to be known for co-writing THE WHITE HORSE INN, also served notice that Korngold had caught a contemporary Viennese mood that encapsulated Art Nouveau, psychoanalysis and an end-of-days atmosphere, a quintessence framed by Freud, Klimt and Schnitzler – all mirrored perfectly in the storyline: Violanta, the wife of Venice’s governor, plots during Carnival to avenge, through assassination, her sister, who committed suicide after being seduced by Prince Alfonso. When the moment comes, however, she acknowledges her true motive: to snuff out her own desire to abandon herself to passion. She sacrifices herself to free herself from “lust and guilt”.

Violanta

Director Christof Loy has already helped four little-known operas from the early 20th century make a successful comeback at the Deutsche Oper Berlin: Erich Wolfgang Korngold's DAS WUNDER DER HELIANE and Riccardo Zandonai's FRANCESCA DA RIMINI were followed by other long-forgotten operatic treasures: Franz Schreker's DER SCHATZGRÄBER in 2022 and finally Ottorino Respighi's LA FIAMMA in 2024.

The Treasure Hunter (Der Schatzgräber)

After bringing Dmitri Shostakovich’s early opera The Nose to life in a wonderfully grotesque staging, Barrie Kosky now turns his attention to a far more radical work by the Russian composer: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a dark tale of sex and violence featuring one of opera’s most fascinating female characters.

Opera events in Berlin next month

Le nozze di Figaro

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Rise and Fall of the City...

Komische Oper Berlin

Sa­lo­me

Komische Oper Berlin

Hansel and Gretel

Deutsche Oper Berlin

The Artelize Podcast and ...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast - A ...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast: A l...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast and ...

Artelize

Madame Butterfly

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Die Zauberflöte (Everding...

Staatsoper Berlin

Wozzeck

Staatsoper Berlin

Don Gio­vanni/­Re­qui­em

Komische Oper Berlin

Die Fledermaus

Deutsche Oper Berlin

La Bohème

Staatsoper Berlin

The Barber of Seville

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Don Carlo

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Tosca

Staatsoper Berlin

Eugene Onegin

Komische Oper Berlin

Lohengrin

Staatsoper Berlin

Der fliegende Holländer

Deutsche Oper Berlin

La traviata

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Violanta

Deutsche Oper Berlin

The Treasure Hunter (Der ...

Deutsche Oper Berlin

La­dy Mac­beth of Mtsensk...

Komische Oper Berlin

Salome

Don Giovanni/Requiem

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk...