Der Besuch der alten Dame
The three-act opera adapts Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, with a German libretto by the playwright.
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The three-act opera adapts Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, with a German libretto by the playwright.
In Dürrenmatt’s 1979 stage reworking, Traps receives two verdicts: metaphysical guilt and legal innocence. The judge leaves the choice to him; Traps ultimately shoots himself and hangs himself.
Edgar and Alice’s marriage has become an exhausting contest of cruelty. The arrival of Alice’s cousin Kurt intensifies their struggle, rendered as a comic psychological fight divided into twelve rounds.
As the Western Roman Empire collapses in 476, Emperor Romulus refuses to resist the Germanic invasion, preferring his chickens. Courtiers plot against him, but when Odoacer arrives, the two rulers discover they share exhaustion with conquest and negotiate a strange settlement.
A group of teachers rehearsing a mock trial asks a local stagehand to fill in for an absent actor. The improvised courtroom game turns accusatory when the group charges Miss Benare with infanticide and exposes her pregnancy by a missing professor.
A fanatically driven prosecutor, Florestan Mississippi, seeks a murder confession from the young widow Anastasia and proposes marriage as her punishment. Their entanglement with two other men—one seeking to change the world and another to save it—turns into a bitter comic struggle over ideology, power and human motives.
The three-act opera adapts Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, with a German libretto by the playwright.
In Dürrenmatt’s 1979 stage reworking, Traps receives two verdicts: metaphysical guilt and legal innocence. The judge leaves the choice to him; Traps ultimately shoots himself and hangs himself.
Edgar and Alice’s marriage has become an exhausting contest of cruelty. The arrival of Alice’s cousin Kurt intensifies their struggle, rendered as a comic psychological fight divided into twelve rounds.
As the Western Roman Empire collapses in 476, Emperor Romulus refuses to resist the Germanic invasion, preferring his chickens. Courtiers plot against him, but when Odoacer arrives, the two rulers discover they share exhaustion with conquest and negotiate a strange settlement.
A group of teachers rehearsing a mock trial asks a local stagehand to fill in for an absent actor. The improvised courtroom game turns accusatory when the group charges Miss Benare with infanticide and exposes her pregnancy by a missing professor.
A fanatically driven prosecutor, Florestan Mississippi, seeks a murder confession from the young widow Anastasia and proposes marriage as her punishment. Their entanglement with two other men—one seeking to change the world and another to save it—turns into a bitter comic struggle over ideology, power and human motives.
In a psychiatric sanatorium, three physicists who claim to be Newton, Einstein, and in contact with King Solomon are revealed as spies or as Möbius, who feigned madness to contain dangerous scientific discoveries. They agree to remain imprisoned to protect humanity, but the director has secretly copied Möbius's work and plans to build an empire.
When the wealthy Claire Zachanassian returns to impoverished Güllen, she offers the town one billion francs on condition that someone kill Alfred Ill, her former lover who once used false witnesses to deny her paternity claim. The townspeople gradually accept the bargain, and Ill accepts the judgment before they kill him and conceal the murder as a death from joy.