The Berlin State Opera shows Charpentier’s “Médée”, conducted by Simon Rattle and directed by Peter Sellars. The stage design is by world-famous architect Frank Gehry, but the biggest event is Magdalena Kožená.
For a long time she, the increasingly meek and desperate woman, simply watched the intrigue against herself. She is a perpetual refugee with two medium-sized children, she is protected behind barriers from the people who are supposedly increasingly rebelling against refugees, threatened by soldiers, her head in a black face mask. Her husband, a proven military man and therefore well-liked in every regime, is planning to leave her and is getting involved with the boss’s daughter of the new, inhospitable host country. But in the end everything turns out differently than usual. The abandoned woman is not the victim, but an avenger, the likes of which theater history has not invented again in the last 2,500 years: Medea.