Helena Citrónová by Sucharitkul, De (2022/2022), Dirigit per Lothar Krause,, Director musical Ivo Hentschel, Theater Hof, Hof, Germany

Auschwitz 1942: Trains from all over Europe rattle into the notorious death camp. Among the forced laborers is a young Slovak Jewess: Helena Citrónová. When the young woman is asked to sing a birthday song for SS warden Franz Wunsch, he is fascinated and mesmerized. What is initially a struggle for bare survival increasingly develops into a forbidden love in Auschwitz - one of the most inhuman places in the world. Does this connection have a chance? The composer Somtow Sucharitkul, celebrated in Thailand, takes the audience into the darkness of the Holocaust with music somewhere between Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and Bernard Herrmann (composer of many Hitchcock film scores), combined with the very own sound of klezmer. The Theater Hof has succeeded in being the first theater in the German-speaking region to obtain the exclusive rights for the opera, which premiered in 2020. Unfortunately, due to the water damage, the premiere cannot take place as planned in the 2021/22 season, but has been postponed to Saturday, October 29, 2022. 80 years after the start of the mass deportations, with this rousing opera we commemorate one of the darkest chapters in German history and its countless victims, because the real story of Helena Citrónová and Franz Wunsch represents the fate of millions of people.