Das verratene Meer - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Das verratene Meer

09/2021
musical direction
Simone Young
Staging
Jossi Wieler
Sergio Morabito
Stage and costumes
Anna Viebrock
Co-set designer
Torsten Köpf
light
Phoenix
Fusako Kuroda
Vera-Lotte Boecker
Noboru / "Number Three"
Josh Lovell
Ryuji Tsukazaki
Bo Skovhus
"Number One," the leader
Erik Van Heyningen
"Number two"
Kangmin Justin Kim
"Number four"
Stefan Astakhov
"Number five"
Martin Häßler

'He' is a seaman, a ship's officer in the Japanese merchant navy, 'she' is a rich, beautiful, young (probably warrior) widow. The two fall in love with each other naturally and in a middle class way. For this reason he even wants to sign off in a banal way and marry her - but whoever is against it, intensely and with hatred and contempt and for various child-pubescent reasons, that is Noboru, Madame Fusako's teenage son. "This is how Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012) outlines the starting point of his opera Das betratere Meer, which premiered in 1990.

With the choice of the subject, Henze follows his fascination for the creation of the enfant terrible of the Japanese post-war literature Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), whose novel Gogo no Eiko (published in German under the title The Sailor who betrayed the sea) is the basis of the opera . Like almost all of this author's creations, this novel creates a claustrophobic scenario of hopelessness, in which the struggle for normalcy is doomed to failure: the tensions of the triangle of figures will escalate in the gruesome lynching of a gang of young people.

The artists Henze and Mishima, who were almost the same age, shared the trauma caused by fascist systems, the collapse of which unleashed artistic production in both of them, but also catapulted them to extreme positions on the political spectrum, as they are hardly conceivable: Henze joined the Italian Communist Party, Mishima became an ultra-nationalist revisionist who died the ritual Japanese suicide after a failed coup attempt.

Henze once formulated his very special point of view between tradition and avant-garde with reference to theater: »Theater, just like music, has to be reinvented again and again and yet lives from centuries of experiences that inspire us, challenge in order to be destroyed to increase, to drive us. Nothing is aligned with the skillful form, the successful formulation ..., but also nothing with negation, renunciation, abstinence, but everything can be aligned through alienation, regardless of the consequences, regardless of the laughter of the old-wise. «His free tonal score ties in with musical-dramatic design principles in in the tradition of Richard Strauss. Embedded in it is a highly differentiated linguistic direction that pulls all vocal stops from Schönberg’s speaking to coloratura singing. In addition to sounds, the composer also integrates elements of entertainment and dance music - following Alban Berg's methods.

Subject to changes.

There are no products matching the selection.