Carmen

In the organizer's words:

In French language with German surtitles

Age recommendation from 15 years

"She was born free and she will die free."

Carmen, who ekes out a living as a cigarette worker in Seville, turns the young soldier Don José's head. When he is ordered to take her into custody after an argument between the factory workers, he lets her escape and takes her into custody himself. From this moment on, he is devoted to Carmen. However, her beloved soon tires of life at the side of the jealous José and throws herself at the torero Escamillo. As it must happen, a deadly showdown ensues in the bullring ...

Carmen marks the climax of Bizet's confrontation with the "opéra comique", the opera with spoken dialogues, and at the same time the break with the genre: "The heroine - immoral from the very beginning, the hero - sinking from one level to the next, the poet, who nowhere reveals a moral: all this horrified the theater directors to such an extent that they tried to change the libretto in every way possible. But Bizet refused to compromise," says Mina Curtiss in her Bizet monograph published in 1978. To this day, Carmen has lost none of its shattering effect. The motif of fate that hovers over Habanera, Seguidilla and the Torero song as a sign of doom can already be heard in the overture. "No Senta sentimentality!", said Friedrich Nietzsche in 1888 in the case of Wagner, "but love as fate, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel - and in this 'nature'!"

Shots are fired in this production and we would also like to point out that flickering light effects are used.

Introduction 35 minutes before the start of each performance