Organization

Singer

Tenor

Kurt Streit

Albrecht von Brandenburg

Baritone

Wolfgang Koch

Mathis der Maler

Bass

Martin Snell

Lorenz von Pommersfelden

Charles Reid

Wolfgang Capito

Franz Grundheber

Riedinger

Raymond Very

Hans Schwalb

Oliver Ringelhahn

Sylvester von Schaumberg

Soprano

Manuela Uhl

Ursula

Katerina Estrada Tretyakova

Regina

Contralto

Magdalena Anna Hofmann

Gräfin Helferstein

Conductor

Bertrand de Billy

Stage director

Keith Warner

Set designer

Johan Engels

Lighting designer

Mark Jonathan

MusikTheater an der Wien

Others

Slovak Philharmonic Choir

Slowakischer Philharmonischer Chor

Orchestra

Vienna Symphony Orchestra

German

Mathis der Maler -  (Mathis the Painter)

Vienna

Austria

Theater an der Wien

Grosser Pausenraum

Mathis the Painter

Approved

MATHIS DER MALER (Paul Hindemith)

With Mathis the painter, Paul Hindemith created his masterpiece and artistic commitment. Using the example of largely fictional episodes of the life of the painter Matthias Grünewald (approx.
1475 to 1530), the creator of the Isenheim Altarpiece, Hindemith himself devised the question of the position of artists in society. This reflects Hindemith's own conflict of conscience in Germany in the 1930s.
After the performance of the Mathis der Maler symphony, which had been written beforehand, under the direction of Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1934, Hitler allegedly forbade the planned premiere of the opera himself. Hindemith left Germany in 1938 and went into exile. Mathis the painter was premiered in Zurich that same year.

During the peasant wars, the painter Mathis was disturbed in his artistic isolation: his friends were fighting on the side of the Reformation against the Catholic rulers. What should he, who works for the Catholic Church in the person of the apparently tolerant Bishop of Mainz, do? Keep painting or join the insurgents? His conscience commands him to fight. Ursula, the daughter of a rich Protestant citizen of Mainz, loves him, but he turns her away. The outbreak of violence in the war shook
him, he withdrew from it and accepted painting as his only God-determined task in life. He is able to express his experiences in works of great artistic power.

"Old folk songs, controversial chants from the Reformation period and Gregorian chant form the nourishing soil for Mathis music" - this is how Hindemith himself explained the sources of his inspiration. He wove these
and other elements of the European musical tradition such as the Concerto grosso, the Chaconne and hymns filigree into his compositional technique, which was trained on the developments of the 1920s. The structure of the sentence structure is always coordinated with the clarity of the voice guidance and the intelligibility of the text. Hindemith's artist drama
immediately gained a permanent place in the operatic repertoire after 1945 due to its great topicality and compositional mastery .

English

Mathis the Painter by Hindemith, From (2012/2012), Directed by Keith Warner,, Conductor Bertrand de Billy, Theater an der Wien, Vienna, Austria

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