The Peri - an angelic mythical creature. Fallen from paradise and thrown into the world, she is denied a return to heaven. It takes three attempts before the gates open for her again: It takes more than the drop of blood of a young man, martyred in war, and the last sigh of a girl who died because she did not want to leave her lover, who was sick with the plague, alone. Only the last gift, the tear of an old man who bitterly regrets his own life's sins at the sight of a child, will enable Peri to enter the kingdom of heaven. Robert Schumann's secular oratorio Paradise and the Peri is based on the oriental epic poem by the Irish poet Thomas Moore. In Hamburg, the Persian myth narrative becomes a panopticon of the very recent past.

EPSG:4326

Paradise and the Peri

Staatsoper Hamburg

Seeking to test their girlfriends’ fidelity, two men wager that they will remain steadfast. They subject the women to passionate onslaught, and in the end, the fortress of their faithfulness falls. The men, however, involved as they are in the experiment, failed to reckon that they too might betray their partners and feelings. All this cheating, confusing, lying – to others and oneself – is grotesquely comical and simultaneously cruel. One side is inclined not to think about the new situation (Guglielmo and Dorabella), while the others try to comprehend it to the point of exhaustion (Fiordiligi and Ferrando). The final ceremony seeks to cement the social status quo, bringing this new freedom to its knees. The marriage, however, is only for show, and beneath the surface of tradition, the first cracks appear.

Così fan tutte

Sir John Falstaff is an anarchist who obeys only the reign of his own enjoyment, an egoist who feeds only his power-hunger and his own flesh, and who would prefer to raze the small-minded morals of his contemporaries like the walls of a fortress – by seducing two women at the same time. Needless to say, his plan is thwarted, but those trying to expose him also fail to emerge unruffled from the confusion they unleash around him – which only the audience can keep track of, barely. “Tutto nel mondo è burla,” but these jokes are only funny because falling into the abyss actually does pose quite a serious risk. Arrigo Boito, the librettist of “Otello”, distilled a sophisticated, ingenious libretto from Shakespeare’s original, driving Verdi to highly complex compositional heights.

Choir of the Hamburg State Opera

Sep 27 - Nov 1, 2025

Paradise and the Peri

Jun 22 - Oct 30, 2025

Così fan tutte

Choir of the Hamburg State Opera