Orfeo by Monteverdi, Minn (2024/2024), Immexxi minn Evgeny Titov,, Surmast Direttur Ottavio Dantone, Opernhaus, Zurich, Switzerland

L'Orfeo On February 24, 1607, a new era in music history began in Mantua. L'Orfeo was heard for the first time in front of a small circle of courtly guests, the musical fable of the local court composer Claudio Monteverdi. The premiere marks nothing less than the birth of opera as an art form, because the composer was the first to recognize what it can mean when music becomes a sung scene: embedded in a dramatic context of action, the characters on stage turn their innermost feelings outwards like never before . The hero in Monteverdi's first opera is Orpheus, and the original Thracian singer sets the standard that the new form wants to live up to: he sings beautifully, so that one can soften the stone. The power of total transgression is inherent in his singing. On his way to fetch his beloved Eurydice back from the underworld, he succeeds in putting the ferryman Charon to sleep with his song of supplication on the banks of the Styx, thereby crossing the threshold into the realm of the dead. Monteverdi's operas have been part of the DNA of the Zurich Opera House since Nikolaus Harnoncourt made a significant contribution to the rediscovery of the Italian composer here in the late 1970s with a cycle of works that received worldwide attention. The direction of Andreas Homoki had also set itself the goal of releasing all Monteverdi operas in new scenic and musical readings. With the new production of L'Orfeo , this cycle, consisting of the three musico-dramatic works and supplemented by Christian Spuck's choreographic approach to the eighth book of madrigals , is complete. The musical direction of L'OrfeoOnce again, the Italian conductor and harpsichordist Ottavio Dantone will take over. For him, historically informed performance practice is not an academic exercise, but virtuoso and joyful musical practice. The director is Evgeny Titov, who is highly regarded in both the acting and opera scene, and who made his debut at the Zurich Opera House last season with George Benjamin's contemporary opera Lessons in Love and Violence .