When the beach lies beneath the pavement, as it was often said in the past, it is 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 break what she breaks. Cruise ships, superyachts, that sort of thing. On her quest for revenge, she meets Lone, who promises her human form for 24 hours and demands one of her fins as a reward. On the pavement, she meets Abad and Ge, an urban guerrilla, schoolchildren on a museum visit to Stammheim. Gladis gets caught between the fronts and questions arise: Does the end justify the means? What remains when every truth is distorted? And if you can't fight violence peacefully, is militancy the last resort left to us all? But or because this is a fairy tale, the kiss of true love can free Gladis from everything in between.

EPSG:4326

Der Rote Wal

The Staatstheater Stuttgart

Rigoletto wants to protect his daughter by all means from the advances of the hated, encroaching Duke - but in the end he is struck by the tragic realization that his revenge has failed most horribly: instead of the Duke, his own daughter has fallen victim to him. Tenor Kai Kluge makes his debut as the Duke of Mantua, while Beate Ritter once again takes on the role of Gilda after the acclaimed series in the 2018/19 season. Devid Cecconi sings the title role. The young, internationally acclaimed Italian-Turkish conductor Nil Venditti is at the podium of the Staatsorchester Stuttgart.

Rigoletto

Attractive because repulsive - that’s one way to describe the contradictory fascination potential of William Shakespeare’s most enigmatic character, Othello. He probably could not have existed at the time of his creation: Black, a stranger, yet risen to the top of Venetian society through merit and spectacular eloquence, he marries the beautiful Desdemona.

Otello 

Celebrations are states of exception where everyday life gets transformed. Even at its very beginning the musical form of opera had a close liaison with festivities. But because the once exclusive festive music should now belong to everyone, we invite you to join us for a celebration in the opera house. In his first staging of a music theatre, Eric Gauthier explores the reasons why and how people celebrate. Together with singers, dancers, choir and orchestra, the audience journeys through the various kinds of a lifetime’s festivities. On the playlist: two centuries of vocal and dance music, including unheard rarities.

The Fest

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

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 mill and, of course, 7 knives.

The Robber Hotzen­plotz

The survival of the Holy Grail’s community is threatened by King Amfortas‘ wound which he received by the magician Klingsor. The only hope that the men have left now is the arrival of a so-called »innocent fool«, who has to become »knowledgeable by empathy«. Parsifal is the chosen one, but is unaware of his appointment as the redeemer of their plight. The seeress Kundry takes it upon her to show him his destiny.

Parsifal

In 1930 Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht created a new type of grand opera, radical in both, entertainment as well as criticism. With the wit of an epic theater and the musical esprit of old and worn bar songs mixed with music of the avant-garde, Weill and Brecht built the fable of a city in paradise that finally perishes from its own utopias: in the end there is only one mortal sin left – the sin of insolvency. Together with a young ensemble, director Ulrike Schwab explores the one question: Who would still dare to dream of a better future today.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

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

Dora is in her mid-twenties and stuck in the sheltered surroundings of her family. Though she still has her whole life ahead of her, she suspects that the future has only the same old worn and well-known ideas to offer than before. Dora, the 21st century’s new heroine of opera, meets her present with total rejection and finds herself in aimless search for something different. Bernhard Lang's rhythm-driven music becomes Dora’s accomplice. In his opera about a longing for something radically new, Lang and librettist Frank Witzel playfully mix varying sounds from different musical epochs whilst laying tracks to centuries old characters, myths and stories.

Dora

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was certain that the secret to winning was surprisingly simple: “to control oneself every minute, regardless of the ups and downs of the game, and not to fall into passion.” Despite this knowledge, Dostoyevsky gambled away all his money and that of his lover at the roulette tables of German health resorts - gambling was forbidden elsewhere - which brought them both to the brink of destitution. Nevertheless, he capitalized on his experiences of loss: in 1866, he freed himself from an extortionate publishing contract with the novel The Gambler, which he wrote under great pressure. And on top of that, he delivered a study of his own (gambling) obsessions.

The Gambler

No other version of the popular story where a mermaid falls in love with a human man and has to give up her form and herself for the love she craves, tells so beautifully of the two parallel worlds as Antonín Dvořák's opera Rusalka. And no one knows this world so well as the dazzling drag performers with whom director Bastian Kraft doubles Dvořák's forest and water creatures. They are experts in transformation and beautiful appearances in the spotlight. Through lip-synching, the drag performers make the fairy tale of mermaid and prince their own. Alongside a top-class ensemble of singers, they are on a quest for a life in which who we love and who we are no longer determines whose existence takes place in the light and whose is forced to take place in the dark.

Rusalka

A man in the midst of a personal crisis in his life: Gustav von Aschenbach is very successful professionally, but a vague sense of yearning drives him to search for something new and mysterious – he therefore decides to travel to Venice. In 1973 and based on a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, Benjamin Britten set to music author Thomas Mann‘s famous novella. Piper’s work has masterfully translated the storyline into theatrical images, and with his opera, the British composer surprised with a many-colored and exotic sounding work.

Death in Venice

The Austrian music band Franui sees itself as a "transformer station between classical and folk music, jazz and contemporary chamber music". In order to release that resulting energy in Stuttgart, Franui has taken on the greatest hits of the so-called "silver operetta" – those works whose composers were driven out of Germany by the National Socialists (Nazis). Experiences of exile and loss, dreams and hopes connect the fates of composers like Paul Abraham with the characters in Joseph Roth's novel Hotel Savoy. Displaced persons without hope or money, soldiers, evil profiteers, real and fake artists and prostitutes have taken up residence in the hotel and await the arrival of billionaire Bloomfield from America – as of the Messiah. But Bloomfield has something completely different in mind than saving the hotel or its illustrious guests ...

Hotel Savoy

Schauspiel Stuttgart

While La Bohème consists only of poetry and not of action, it is said that with Tosca it is the other way around: only action, no poetry. Even the librettist Giuseppe Giacosa considered Sardou's original completely unsuitable for an opera. “What made Puccini come to terms with such a real and dealing with a brutal subject whose actors are little more than puppets entangled in a highly intelligent, cleverly designed plot? ”asked the music critic Mosco Carner. Maybe just that? For over 20 years Willy Decker's classic production of Puccini's Sex and Crime masterpiece has been a repertory perennial.

Tosca

„As a stranger I arrived here“. Yes. But who is „I“? A lonesome wanderer about 200 years ago, who makes his way through a winter landscape after the dashing of his hopes in unrequited love? Franz Schubert’s „Winterreise“ is based upon poems by Wilhelm Müller and was composed in 1827 in a time following the years after Austrian State Chancellor Metternich’s conservative restorationist policy in 1815. A sense of collective resignation is very subtly expressed: as a private romantic drama. With his “compositorial interpretation” in 1993, Hans Zender attempted to make the force of the original composition perceptible again to a contemporary audience. In 2020, the Dutch video artist Aernout Mik takes it up by adding a further dimension. In his production, he focuses on the dissolution of the individual between the virtual and the real world which for Mik represents modern man’s “Winterreise”.

Schuberts "Winterreise“

A material that is as popular as it is ambivalent and evokes countless associations with one word: Casanova! Just one day after Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had launched probably the theater sensation of the Weimar Republic with the Threepenny Opera in what would later become the Berliner Ensemble, director and choreographer Erik Charell followed suit right next door in the predecessor of the Friedrichstadtpalast. The capital’s press was enthusiastic: “Casanova is a great success. It means the resurrection of the operetta!” (Der Montag). The “electrifying music of Johann Strauss” (Berliner Tageblatt) was not only rearranged by Ralph Benatzky, but also electrified – by “the new instrument vibraphone”, as announced in the program booklet for the premiere.

Casanova

Fear of death - a bad advisor since time immemorial: King Idomeneo, whose fleet sinks into the waters of Crete shortly before returning home from the Trojan War, swears to the sea god Poseidon that if he survives, he will sacrifice the first human being he meets on the shore. But as fate – or rather the theater – would have it, this is of course his own son Idamante. To make matters worse, he has fallen in love with a Trojan prisoner, Ilia, which infuriates the Greek princess Elettra. Idomeneo, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s perfect "drama for music", is one of a series of Greek war dramas retold according to the taste of the 18th century.

Idomeneo

Recreating reality is all well and good, according to Giuseppe Verdi, "but inventing reality is better, far better". And what sort of reality he invented in his Troubadour opera: Swapped children, avenged mothers, sacrificed lovers and more... An almost mythical tale full of unbelievable twists and turns that repeatedly put all the characters right into a state of emergency. Verdi was far more concerned with the credibility of the emotions and not so much with the credibility of the plot itself: Singing as a kind of utopia, as the opening of a space that does not exist in recreated reality. In his staging of Verdi's opera, director Paul-Georg Dittrich goes in search of exactly these moments.

Il Trovatore

By the middle of the 19th Century, the figure of Salome, a woman who enforced her erotic desires by using lethal violence, had developed into both – incarnation of female ferocity and symbol for pure eroticism – in short to the most important Christian-mythological female figure within the world of music and literature. It resembles an ecstatic dance on the verge of a precipice which finally evolved into a symbol of decadence: Until today, the opera has not lost any of its equally fascinating and disturbing power.

Opera events in Stuttgart

Der Rote Wal

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Rigoletto

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Otello

Staatsoper Stuttgart

The Fest

The Artelize Podcast and ...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast - A ...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast: A l...

Artelize

The Artelize Podcast and ...

Artelize

The Robber Hotzen­plotz

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Parsifal

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Rise and Fall of the City...

Staatsoper Stuttgart

The Magic Flute

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Dora

Staatsoper Stuttgart

The Gambler

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Rusalka

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Death in Venice

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Death in Venice

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Hotel Savoy

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Tosca

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Schuberts "Winterreise“

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Casanova

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Idomeneo

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Il Trovatore

Staatsoper Stuttgart

Salome

Staatsoper Stuttgart

The Robber Hotzenplotz