Norman Reinhardt

What begins like a fairy-tale turns into a whimsical fantasy halfway between magic farce and Masonic mysticism: The Magic Flute links a love story with the great questions of the Enlightenment, juxtaposes bird-catcher charm with queenly vengeance, and bewitches the listener with music that mixes cheerful melodies, lovers’ arias, showstopping coloraturas and mysterious chorales. W. A. Mozart’s opera premiered in 1791 and is one of the most often performed operas in the world. The production on the Bregenz Festival lake stage impresses the audience with a fantastic setting framed by three dog-dragons, each of them more than twenty meters in height. “David Pountney finds stunning answers to the everlasting questions surrounding ‘The Magic Flute’.” (Tagesspiegel) “The ‘play on the lake’ in Bregenz takes the audience into a fantasy world.” (Salzburger Nachrichten)

Seeking revenge for her sister’s suicide, Violanta vows to have her seducer killed. As hatred turns to love, can they still escape the deadly fate she has plotted herself? Set during the carnival in Venice, Violanta is Korngold’s second opera, composed at the tender age of 17. This production marks Violanta’s Italian premiere over a hundred years after its creation, contributing to its well-deserved rediscovery.

Webers great heroic-romantic opera Euryanthe premiered in Vienna in 1823. It concerns the wronged Euryanthe, victim of a plot to establish her unfaithfulness, but her love imbues her with colossal strength which Weber characterizes with acute psychological insight. Through-composed and dispensing with spoken dialogue, its chivalric plot provides opportunities for a series of arias, ariosos, duets, cavatinas and choruses that contain some of his greatest operatic music. This production employs the operas original version with a few, very minor cuts.

At Salzburg Festival, Cecilia Bartoli shines as Ariodante with her dazzling coloratura in a highly acclaimed new production by the German director Christoph Loy, who is known for his clever psychological stagings. Loy turns Handel's splendid baroque opera into an exciting and differentiated reflection on gender roles.

Gathered in the Scottish Highlands, the spirits grant the vampire, Lord Ruthwen, another year of life on the condition he sacrifices three young women within 24 hours. Although a young man Aubry knows Ruthwen is a vampire, he is sworn to secrecy. When the young man’s own lover Malwina is about to become the vampire’s next victim, Aubry has to choose between saving his bride or remaining true to his oath. Der Vampyr is by a formative figure in Hanover's musical life; the composer Heinrich Marschner led the theatre that preceded the Staatsoper, as Royal Hanoverian Kapellmeister and Intendant, for almost three decades from 1831. Marschner adapted John Polidori's novella ‘The Vampyre’, which was modelled on British dandy and writer Lord Byron. Our fascination with the bloodsucking outsider is still as strong two centuries later. Brilliant German director Ersan Mondtag and his team explore social outsiderness and the curse of immortality.