“‘You see,’ said the officer, ‘two kinds of needles in multiple arrangements. Each long one has a short one next to it. The long one writes, and the short one squirts water to wash off the blood and keep the writing always clear.” Munich and Franz Kafka’s story “In the penal colony” – this is the story of a “great failure”. At least that was his own conclusion about the reading from the novella in Hunger November 1916 in the unheated Munich Galerie Goltz, which was located next to Café Luitpold at the time. Did people in the audience really collapse at the description of the cruel execution apparatus, as an eyewitness named Max Pulver claimed? (More on this in Alfons Schweiggert’s “Franz Kafka in Munich”, 2007) And if so, could something like this happen again on April 19th – in the atrium of the Palace of Justice?
This is the place where the show trials of the Nazi dictatorship took place Opera Incognita very deliberately chosen for the Munich premiere of Philip Glass’ opera adaptation “In the Penal Colony”. In his setting from 2000, the US composer manages to penetrate deeply into Kafka’s disturbing cosmos through the tormenting monotony of serial music. You can experience an intimate, ambiguous chamber play about people, morals and machines with two protagonists, the Opera Incognita choir as an extra and a string orchestra. More Performances are April 20th, 25th, 26th and 27th, every 8 p.m. If you miss the appointments: This Jewish Chamber Orchestra The Penal Colony is also dedicated to this: on June 9th and 10th in the Kammerspiele.
Connecting Respighi and Orff: The members of the State Opera’s opera studio, here at an aria evening, traditionally show their skills in a major season production.
(Photo: Wilfried Hösl)
There is this photo in which you can see Carl Orff together with conductor Clemens Krauss, opera director Rudolf Hartmann and choir director Josef Kugler discussing the score of “The moon” bowed, it must have been recorded before the work’s premiere at the Bavarian State Opera on February 5, 1939. You inevitably think about the time and circumstances and the involvement of these people with the Nazi state when Orff’s fairy tale opera about the stolen moon is now on the program again. The new production by the Bavarian State Opera’s opera studio links “Moon” with another opera from the 1930s: Ottorino Respighi’s “Lucrezia”, both in reduced versions. That sounds like an exciting project. It is also curious to know who is working here. Not an all-male thing like at the premiere, but two young women introduce themselves: Ustina Dubitsky, former member of the children’s choir of the Bavarian State Opera, makes her house debut as a conductor. The Ukrainian Tamara Trunova, playwright and chief director of the Kiev Left Bank Theater, is directing. premiere of the evening with the young opera stars Cuvilliés Theater is on April 24th.
The Bavarian chamber singer Brigitte Fassbaender stages Otto Nicolai’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” at the Gärtnerplatztheater.
(Photo: Frank Leonhardt/dpa/picture alliance)
That too Gärtnerplatztheater has an opera studio, and young talents have been prepared for their stage careers at the house since 2023. You could recently experience her at a master class with the extremely energetic, lovingly demanding Brigitte Fassbaender, who has always sought out something new throughout her long career as an opera singer, but especially as an artistic director and director. So how does the fearless become a slapstick like Otto Nicolais “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (1849) turn into the now? The comic-fantastic opera with the fat knight Sir John Falstaff opened on April 26, 7:30 p.m Premiere at Gärtnerplatz.