Die Fledermaus‐ Il pipistrello: Teatro Comunale di Bologna

About the Event

Enjoy this masterpiece by Johann Strauss in the Comunale Nouveau in Bologna.

Less than a year after the collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange (1873), the Habsburg capital exorcises the crisis between a turn of the waltz and a glass of champagne. It exorcises it with uninhibited and disengaged eros, the moment that cannot be grasped but with which one can only dance. 'Above the goblets from which we drank invisible death already crossed his bony hands.' repeats Baron Trotta in Roth's Capuchin Crypt: we are on the eve of World War I, but the phrase would not be out of place in 1874 when Die Fledermaus is written. A story of betrayal and cross‐courting, masquerades, youthful pranks awaiting revenge, a night in jail and one at Prince Orlofsky's party. Lawyers, bourgeois, tenors, maids, dancers, eccentric foreign aristocrats, jailers: all swept up in the perfectly organized whirlwind of intellectual and sensual play. And, let us remember, operetta is not a diminutive, but a pet name, never to be underestimated.