Dido and Aeneas / Erwartung

Dido and Aeneas

Erwartung

The creative team surrounding director Krysztof Warlikowski has a long history of successful collaboration that has taken them to all of Europe’s great opera houses.

At the Bayerische Staatsoper the team last staged Salome in almost the same configuration in 2019. For the DidoandAeneas / Erwartung double bill, Małgorzata Szczęśniak is again designing the stage and costumes, as she has for all of Warlikowski's productions since 1992. For more than 20 years Felice Ross has been responsible for the lighting design for the team's opera productions. Kamil Polak, who won an Oscar in 2008 in the Animated Short Film category, designs the videos, and dancer and actor Claude Bardouil is in charge of movement direction – tried and tested as always. Dramaturge Christian Longchamp, also connected to the team by numerous projects at other theatres, is now also working for the first time in Munich.

Warlikowski is also connected with the singer now embodying both roles, Dido and the Woman, Ausrine Stundyte. They celebrated highly acclaimed success at the Salzburg Festival in 2020 with Elektra, and the singer has been a regular guest in Munich since 2015, most recently appearing as Regan in Reimann's Lear in 2021 and Jeanne in Krzysztof Penderecki's The Devils of Loudun in 2022.

"What heavy air rushes out ... like a storm that stands ... so horribly calm and empty," is how the woman in Arnold Schoenberg's Expectation describes the mood that surrounds her and in which she is reflected. The 1909 monodrama continues Purcell's 1689 opera Dido and Aeneas in the Bayerische Staatsoper’s new production. A bridge is thus built across the centuries, across tonal and textual languages, from the myth of the Queen of Carthage to the expressionist situation that manifests itself as a mysterious non-location in Marie Pappenheim's libretto, which she writes in the shortest possible time, as if in a breath for Schönberg. An arrival remains a longing wishful thought. Dido, so the story goes, had to leave her homeland and finally arrived on the North African coast, where she founded the city of Carthage. Aeneas also ends up here, and so two people meet, both in search of a future home, both driven by the flight from the violence of the past, which seems to have caught up with them in the end, when expectation becomes the realization of loss.