Nils Holgersson is flying away with the geese! In this children’s opera by Elena Kats-Chernin and Susanne Felicitas Wolf, our shrunken hero scampers through plenty of adventures alongside his friend Martin, a domestic goose, and turns out to be bigger than he thought in the end!

Nils Hol­gers­son’s Won­drous Ad­ven­tures

Schiller Theater

The male alliance of the Knights of the Grail is in crisis. Time and again, knights desert to the opposite realm of the sorcerer Klingsor, who had previously been rejected by the circle of knights.

Parsifal

Vienna State Opera

Culture creates meaning and structure. The music theater project by Christopher Rüping, Omer Meir Wellber, and Malte Ubenauf demonstrates that it can even provide existential support. Here, for an extraterrestrial group, Mozart's music becomes a daily reminder and admonition of what it means to be and remain human. And what happens when it all falls silent. Thus, we rediscover Mozart's music in distant worlds.

The Great Silence

Hamburg State Opera

La traviata –directly translated as »the one who has lost her way«–is, of course, the Parisian courtesan Violetta Valéry. Already dying from an incurable lung disease, she falls in love with Alfredo Germont. Yet her feelings are in conflict with her way of life and all sense of reason; ultimately, her quest for freedom and happiness is defeated by the moral strictures of bourgeois society. When first performed in Venice in 1853, this story was considered scandalous: an opera about a courtesan who dies of tuberculosis and is also modelled on a real-life woman in Parisian society was an outrageous inno-vation for the time. Focusing on the complex relationship between Violetta, her lover Alfredo and his father Giorgio, Giuseppe Verdi created a captivating and fully-rounded character, expressed through music that shifts between lyrical bel canto passages and powerful musico-dramatic outbursts. Director Barbora Horáková Joly places »La traviata« in the dazzling world of 19th-century vaudeville.

La traviata

Semperoper Dresden

Podcast link: https://youtu.be/4hagYvrYbuM

The Artelize Podcast and Kasper Holten - Pedefining Opera for the modern world

Podcast link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d36M5Hi6O80

The Artelize Podcast - A legacy of innovation in Opera: Celebrating Marc A. Scorca

Podcast link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59E40S_EQSY

The Artelize Podcast: A love letter that was never sent

Podcast link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THv6htilWtI

The Artelize Podcast and Adolfo Corrado: Mediterranean flavors, opera and social media

Singers from Opera Theatre present a program of scenes and excerpts.


"Bach's Lunch" is a weekly Thursday afternoon concert series during the school year, jointly sponsored by the School of Music and the Center for Spiritual and Ethical Development (CSED).

EPSG:4326

Bach’s Lunch – School of Music Voice Area Noontime Concert: Opera Theatre

The Pennsylvania State University

The young farmer Nemorino is head over heels in love with the beautiful and rich Adina, but he doesn't dare woo her. In the story of Tristan and Isolde, he sees the solution to his problem: a love potion is needed! When a company of soldiers, led by the macho Belcore, arrives in the village, time is of the essence, as Adina seems to take a liking to the self-confident sergeant. Just at that moment, the traveling physician Dulcamara arrives in the village, praising his medicine, which is supposed to cure all ailments. From him, Nemorino buys a bottle of Isolde's legendary love potion. Admittedly, Dulcamara has sold him nothing but a bottle of red wine, but to the quack's surprise, after a few complications, the drink achieves its desired result and unites the young lovers.

The love potion – L'elisir d'amore

Stadttheater Klagenfurt

One day. Three ways to die. Director Eirik Stubø takes on one of opera literature's most multifaceted portraits of women and with perhaps the most beautiful music of all - Puccini's Tosca.

Tosca

Norrlandsoperan

In the 19th century, Penzance was one of the most idyllic and peaceful little towns on the British isle. Pirates... here?! The kings of English operetta, the writing duo Gilbert & Sullivan, had a knack for humorously subverting their audience’s expectations. With this satirical and subversive “recipe,” they created one hit after another.

The rather absurd plot of The Pirates of Penzance would have done proud even to the British humor of Monty Python back in the 19th century: A young man is not trained as a pilot, but instead apprenticed to the Pirates of Penzance because his hard-of-hearing governess confuses the words “pilot” and “pirate.” Upon turning 21, Frederic should have completed his apprenticeship—if only he hadn’t been born in a leap year! According to pirate logic, that makes him just five years old… From this existential dilemma unfolds a love story between the young pirate apprentice and Mabel, a young lady from the British military aristocracy..

The Pirates of Penzance

Volksoper Wien

Three riddles must be solved by anyone who wants to marry the beautiful and ice-cold Princess Turandot. Anyone who fails them will be punished with death. But Prince Kalaf, who is unknown in the kingdom, passes the trial. Turandot desperately searches for a way to escape marriage to the much-hated man... With “Nessun dorma”, Puccini created one of the most famous tenor arias in opera literature. For the Taiwanese director Huan-Hsiung Li, Puccini's opera is a fairy tale, which he tells in the form of a dream that drifts back to the ancient Yuan dynasty.

Turan­dot

Theater Duisburg

German Oper am Rhein

La Bohème, composed by Giacomo Puccini, is one of the most beloved and frequently performed operas in the world's operatic repertoire. Premiered on February 1, 1896, at the Teatro Regio in Turin, under the baton of the young Arturo Toscanini, the work was enthusiastically received and established Puccini as one of the greatest composers of his time. Along with Madama Butterfly and Tosca, La Bohème holds a special place in the public's hearts for its moving humanity and the intensity of its emotions.

La Bohème

Riberas del Guadaira Auditorium Theatre

Calderón Theater

Alicante Main Theatre

Social Theatre, Basauri

Great Falla Theatre

Jean Alary Theater

Auditorium & Convention Center The Batel

House of Culture

Great Theatre of Elche

Serrano Theatre

Buero Vallejo's Theatre

Huesca Congress Palace

Theater Le Blanc-Mesnil

Breton Theatre, Logroño

Margarita Lozano Auditorium

La Colonne Theater

Massy Opera

Mira Theatre

Adolfo Marsillach Auditorium Theatre

Serantes Cultural Hall

Teulada Auditorium

Boulevard theatre

Torrent Auditorium

Municipal Theater of Torrevieja

Olympia Theatre, Valencia

Principal Theatre, Zaragoza

La Traviata is set in the world of Parisian high society. This popular opera tells the story of the courtesan, Violetta Valéry: her loves and her sad fate. It is based on the dramatic adaptation of the romantic novel, "La Dame aux Camélias" by Alexandre Dumas fils, modeled by the author on the high-class mistress, Marie Duplessis. Giuseppe Verdi then took the story, making its heroine a contemporary woman, and writing an innovative opera in which he raised the role of the music itself to that of expressing the story's emotions. Starting with "Libiamo ne' lieti calici", which has become a well-known, staple tune of gala concerts, the work features numerous other famous songs, such as Violetta's most technically demanding aria, "Ah, fors'è lui-sempre libera", in the prelude foretelling tragedy, and Germont's "Di Provenza il mar, il suol".

La Traviata

New National Theatre

Scylla lives withdrawn into herself, as if in emotional hibernation. Reason, peace, and harmony reign in her cosmos. When Glaucus enters her life, everything changes: She experiences love in all its colors and facets – and does not recognize herself. The opera describes all the lust, wildness, panic, and despair that the young woman experiences as she rediscovers the world for herself. In the end, she will be someone else. Jean-Marie Leclair's rarely performed only opera is a musical discovery. Director Claus Guth returns to Opernhaus Zürich with this new production.

Scylla and Glaucus

Zurich Opera House

Following on from Puccini’s LA RONDINE and Johann Strauss’s DIE FLEDERMAUS, Rolando Villazón returns to the Deutsche Oper Berlin to tackle one of the great comedies of the bel canto genre and demonstrate that he can do humour. L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI remains one of the most popular works by Gioacchino Rossini, who is said to have dashed the piece off in less than a month and was a tender 21 years of age when the opera premiered at Venice’s Teatro San Benedetto in 1813. It’s a testament to Rossini’s boldness that he chose material that had been set to music only a few years before by his more experienced colleague Luigi Mosca. His audacity paid off, with the subsequent triumph bringing him immediate fame across Italy and widespread popularity soon afterwards throughout Europe.

L’Italiana in Algeri

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Richard Wagner revolutionised music with his version of theTristan story, popular since the Middle Ages. His opening Tristan chord paved the way for modern music and encapsulates the core of this tragic love story – an insatiable longing, ceaselessly striving for relief. »Only in the face of death are the lovers able to give themselves unrestrainedly to each other«, said Katharina Thoma, focussing on the subconscious, their past lives, loss and the meaning for life of both protagonists. She explores the reasons for loneliness, which go beyond societal difficulties and external influences in Johannes Leiacker’s clear, focussed space.

Tristan und Isolde

Oper Frankfurt

Did Richard Wagner already know when, in The Flying Dutchman, he first explored the notion of redemption, that this would end up being the central concern of his art? In his final opera, Parsifal, which was first performed in Bayreuth in 1882, it is not just a single person but society as a whole that awaits a saviour – buoyed by the hope of one day meeting the One who will fulfil this role. Parsifal’s qualification for this tremendous task is that he has become “knowing through compassion” – a process that takes many years, perhaps an entire lifetime. But there are forces trying to hinder him on his path. Will Parsifal be willing to place himself at the service of the community? Parsifal, which has been called a “stage consecration festival”, is still an overwhelming experience today. Can art truly help us find redemption?

The king dies. Amfortas, leader of the Grail Brotherhood, is tormented by a wound that will not heal - struck by his arch-enemy Klingsor, to whom he also lost the Holy Spear of Christ that was guarded by the Brotherhood. Day after day, the Knights of the Grail are forced to watch helplessly as Amfortas dies of pain and guilt. Only a prophecy gives them hope: a “pure fool” will one day redeem the suffering king through his compassion and win back the Holy Spear, which the fallen Grail knight Klingsor guards in his magic garden. And then Parsifal knocks on the gates of the Grail Castle...

Considered too realistic at its premiere in 1853, La Traviata remains one of the essential operas in the lyric repertoire. At the end of the first act, Violetta proclaims sempre libera (always free): is this a feminist plea ahead of its time or a tragic illusion? From the ballroom to the confines of the sanatorium, Verdi infuses his masterpiece with ardent music, sometimes breathless, but constantly seeking to free itself from conventions to achieve authentic beauty. Silvia Paoli, one of the great directors of our time, dares a powerful and virtuoso dramaturgical gesture, in total osmosis with the direction of Roderick Cox who brings this iconic score to incandescence, ideally served by the solar soprano of Ruzan Mantashyan and the very remarkable tenor Omer Kobiljak.

Opéra Comédie

Elsa of Brabant is suspected of having killed her younger brother Gottfried in the forest. When King Henry the Fowler asks Elsa to defend herself, she pleads for an imaginary knight to come to her aid. Suddenly, Lohengrin, the Knight of the Swan, appears. He promises to fight for Elsa, but makes her promise beforehand never to question him about his identity or provenance.

Lohengrin

Drawing loosely on motifs from Christianity, Buddhism, assorted legends and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Richard Wagner eventually completed a myth of his own, PARSIFAL. The work that he dubbed a “stage-hallowing play” tells the story of a “pure fool” who is blissfully unaware of his own nature and calling. Parsifal sallies forth into the ascetic brotherhood of the Knights of the Grail and into another very different world, that of Klingsor’s erotically charged garden, where a kiss from Kundry infuses him with an enlightenment that leads him to release Amfortas, the King of the Grail, from his suffering and redeem the brotherhood.

Julies Massenet’s much loved opera Werther moves between ecstasy and resignation, dream and reality, sensual desire and the longing for death. Central to this feverish drama, based on Goethe‘s 1774 epistolary novel, are Werther and his impossible love for Charlotte, who promised her dying mother to marry dependable Albert. Charlotte repeatedly turns Werther down, although she shares his feelings. It ends with Werther taking his life on Christmas Eve.

Opera events in Le Bouveret this week

Nils Hol­gers­son’s Won­d...

Komische Oper Berlin

Parsifal

Wiener Staatsoper

The Great Silence

Staatsoper Hamburg

La traviata

Semperoper Dresden

The Artelize Podcast and ...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast - A ...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast: A l...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast and ...

Artelize

Bach’s Lunch – School of ...

Penn State School of Music

The love potion – L'elisi...

Stadttheater Klagenfurt

Tosca

Norrlandsoperan

The Pirates of Penzance

Volksoper Wien

Turan­dot

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

La Bohème

Opera 2001

La Traviata

Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra

Scylla and Glaucus

Opernhaus Zürich

L’Italiana in Algeri

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Tristan und Isolde

Oper Frankfurt

Parsifal

Semperoper Dresden

Parsifal

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

La Traviata

Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier

Lohengrin

Staatsoper Hamburg

Parsifal

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Werther

Oper Frankfurt

Nils Holgersson’s Wond...

Turandot