Deutsche Oper Berlin, season 2025/2026
“VIOLANTA”
Opera in one act after a libretto by Hans Müller-Einigen
Music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold
As a prologue ‘A Fancy P5‘ Lute piece by John Dowland
1st movement, ‘Prelude’, from Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6, by Alban Berg
Simone Trovai ÓLAFUR SIGURDARSON
Violanta LAURA WILDE
Alfonso MIHAILS CULPAJEVS
Giovanni Bracca KANGYOON SHINE LEE
Bice LILIT DAVTYAN
Barbara STEPHANIE WAKE-EDWARDS
Matteo ANDREI DANILOV
First maid HYE-YOUNG MOON
Second maid LUCY BAKER
First soldier MICHAEL DIMOVSKI
Second soldier PAUL MINHYUNG ROH
Lute PEDRO ALCÀCER
Chor der Deutschen Oper Berlin
Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin
Dancers of the Opernballett der Deutschen Oper Berlin
Conductor Sir Donald Runnicles
Chorus master Jeremy Bines
Director David Hermann
Stage design, Video Jo Schramm
Costume design Sybille Wallum
Light design Ulrich Niepel
Berlin, 25 January 2026
Following Umberto Giordano’s Fedora, the Deutsche Oper Berlin is venturing into a lesser-known work by a well-known composer: Violanta by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. That alone is commendable. The one-act opera by the then 17-year-old prodigy, at 75 minutes, barely fills an opera evening and was premiered in Munich in 1916 under Bruno Walter, together with his debut work Der Ring des Polykrates. It is a pity that the Deutsche Oper does not follow suit, and that director David Hermann instead precedes the one-act opera with a lute piece by the famous English Renaissance composer John Dowland, which unfortunately gets lost in Germany’s second-largest opera house, and the prelude to Alban Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6. He justifies this by saying that the former illustrates the action in 15th-century Venice and that Berg’s prelude has an extremely expressive density, thus echoing Korngold’s compact form. To me, the condensed Berg seems more like a reminiscence of Gustav Mahler, reflecting the impressionistic zeitgeist of the music world at that time. The prelude transitions almost imperceptibly into the opera’s overture. The director intervenes indirectly in the work, and shortly afterwards directly, when Violanta takes over the first phrases of the maids, as well as Alfonso Giovanni’s Zum Fest! Zum Fest! Komm mit mir! Fort…! at the end. Korngold already displays his confident, unique language in his early work with colourful music, a mixture of late Romanticism and modern style. The drama is arranged around the Venetian noblewoman Violanta, who persuades her frustrated husband to murder her sister’s seducer, who committed suicide. However, she succumbs to him and sacrifices herself instead of him in order to be free of guilt and lust. The drama is sultry and charged, touching on psychoanalysis, which had just come into fashion. Musically, the precocious Korngold oscillates sophisticatedly between Mahler and Richard Strauss, leaving no doubt about his path to worldwide success with Die tote Stadt, whose hits my grandfather loved and still listened to on shellac records with Richard Tauber, illegally after 1933. The Nazis’ racial fanaticism banned Korngold’s works from theatres in Germany and the countries they occupied. In 1934, the composer accepted an invitation from Max Reinhardt to go to Hollywood to arrange film music. This allowed him to build a reputation in the United States until the annexation of Austria in 1938, when he finally moved there with his family. Between 1935 and 1946, he composed music for no fewer than 19 Warner Brothers films. Unfortunately, he was unable to repeat his former successes in Europe after the Second World War, and his works fell into oblivion. He died in 1957, long before a certain renaissance of his music began in the 1970s, in which the Deutsche Oper played a major role with two productions of Die tote Stadt, one in 1983 by artistic director Götz Friedrich, which was extremely successful, and one twenty years later by Philippe Arlaud, which was unfortunately less so. This was followed in 2018 by Das Wunder der Heliane with the wonderful Sara Jakubiak in Christof Loy’s harmonious interpretation, and now Violanta, of which there is both an audio and a video recording: Marek Janowski recorded it in Munich in the late 1970s with the young Siegfried Jerusalem and Éva Marton, and theatre veteran Pier Luigi Pizzi staged it in early 2020 at the Teatro Regio di Torino with Pinchas Steinberg conducting, reviewed on this website by fellow critic Giordano Cavagnino on 28 January 2020. On this cold January Sunday, thanks are due to the outgoing General Music Director Sir Donald Runnicles, who leads the Orchester der Deutschen Oper to great but also loud form, and even more so to the passionately stirring score by the young composer, which prompts the premiere audience to break into unanimous, frenetic applause. It certainly cannot have been due to the poor direction, with pointed-hat pantomime interludes at the beginning and masked, misshapen women towards the end. Sybille Wallum’s costumes have nothing to do with the Renaissance, but rather with the time when the piece was written. Jo Schramm’s stage design can still be regarded as positive. Influenced by Wieland Wagner, the sloping stage is crowned by a Saturn ring. From this, claustrophobic little rooms screw themselves upwards, in which Violanta encounters her sister, Alfonso’s mother, or herself as an old woman or the mother Mary with six breasts. In a preliminary interview with the director, there is still talk of the intoxicating love duet between Violanta and Alfonso, in which the two sing themselves into a rousing ecstasy that he wants to narrate sensually. One imagines Alfonso as an attractive Latin lover whom Violanta simply has to fall in love with. Hermann transforms him into a bald accountant with horn-rimmed glasses who eagerly takes notes as a psychoanalyst. Eroticism therefore only occurs in Korngold’s music, which Runnicles eagerly crackles with, placing high demands on the singers. Ólafur Sigurdarson, experienced in Wagner and Bayreuth, is best suited to the role of Violanta’s husband Simone. His well-controlled baritone is unaffected by the waves of sound, and in his case, surtitles are superfluous, as he is so easy to understand. Condemned to playing the type of a tax advisor, Mihails Culpajevs holds his own vocally. Being Latvian, he has certainly gone through the tough Russian school of singing, which focuses on vocal amplitude. His lyrical tenor sometimes still reaches its limits. Laura Wilde is the weak point, both vocally and dramatically. She has an all-American soprano voice without any particular timbre, which sings everything without leaving an impression, sometimes sharp in exposed passages, and as an actress she shows little personality to dominate as Violanta. The Chor der Deutschen Oper Berlin singing behind the scenes sounds strangely muddy, and of the supporting roles, only Stephanie Wake-Edwards’ lush mezzo-soprano as Barbara stands out. The rest of the cast is solid, but hardly stands a chance in Korngold’s sonic frenzy. Photo Marcus Lieberenz