Tales from the Vienna Woods: Komische Oper Berlin
About the Event
Experience Ödön von Horváth's deeply melancholic folk piece, which premiered at the Deutsches Theater in 1931 under the artistic directorship of Max Reinhardt, in a scoring by the Austrian composer KH Gruber.
This opera, which premiered to great acclaim at the Bregenz Festival in July 2014, will be performed in Germany for the first time at the Komische Oper Berlin in a production by the young Polish director Michał Zadara, who will thereby also be giving his German début as an opera director.
On the banks of the "beautiful blue Danube", the toy merchant Leopold, known as the "king of magic", is celebrating the betrothal of his daughter Marianne to the upstanding butcher Oskar. Her encounter with the sensitive dreamer Alfred gives Marianne the courage to perform an act of self‐determination: virtually overpowered by a passion she has hitherto never experienced, Marianne breaks off her engagement in order to find happiness by Alfred's side. Yet the dream of happiness is all too soon overtaken by reality: Marianne, who has been cast out by her father, and the child she has borne her lover soon become a burden to the wastrel Alfred. Marianne's social degradation brings her ever lower, until she has no other option but to ruefully return to the butcher whom she does not love – yet there is the problem of the "sinful" child she has borne Alfred.
A native of Vienna, HK Gruber is one of the major composers of our time. He is a notorious malcontent whose compositions are impossible to pigeon‐hole. His works often feature a dark and at times morbid humour. In Tales from the Vienna Woods, Gruber not only finds all manner of tongue‐in‐cheek references – from Johann Strauss waltzes through to Puccini's La Bohème – and his oh‐so‐typical cheeky notes, but also returns time and again to very quiet, lyrical moments.
Cast / Production
Musical Direction: Hendrik Vestmann
Staging: Michał Zadara
Stage Design: Robert Rumas
Costumes: Julia Kornacka
Video: Barbara Wysocka, Artur Sienicki
Dramaturgy: Johanna Wall
Lighting: Diego Leetz
Marianne: Claudia Boyle
Alfred: Tom Erik Lie
Oskar: Adrian Strooper
Valerie: Ursula Hesse von den Steinen
King of Magic: Jens Larsen
The Mother: Christiane Oertel
The Grandmother: N.N.
Erich: Ivan Turšić
Riding instructor/ Confessor: Hans Gröning
Mister: Hans‐Peter Scheidegger
