Mazeppa

Premiere on 15. March 2027

Composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Text by the composer, based on the libretto by Victor Burenin, from the poem Poltawa by Alexander Pushkin.

Opera in three acts (six scenes) (1884)

recommended for ages 14 and up

In Russian. With surtitles in German and English. New Production.

Introductions (in German) take place one hour before the start of each performance (except on opening night) in the Capriccio-Saal. Seating is limited, duration approx. 20 minutes.

The premiere will be broadcast live on BR Klassik radio.

>>> To the introductory matinee

Medienpartner

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung der

Along with Eugen Onegin and The Queen of Spades, Mazeppa is the second of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s three operas based on texts by Alexander Pushkin – and the least well-known, outside the Russian-speaking world at any rate. Its story based on historical events some 300 years ago recounts an explosive conflict between numerous nationalities (Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Swedes, Turks and Tatars) in a geopolitically important region, with a charismatic leader at its core – Mazeppa, the Cossack Hetman, hailed as a national hero in today’s Ukraine. This historical basis provides the backdrop for a personal tragedy. It tells the tale of the tragic love of a young woman for an old man, which is crushed by power political ambitions. Mariya leaves her parents and childhood friend Andrey to live with Mazeppa. The subsequent highly treasonous machinations jeopardise all interpersonal relations. To afford the libretto originally written for a colleague the right pulsing energy, the composer set almost all of Pushkin’s original dialogue passages to music. The topos of fate manifested in Mariya’s skill becomes the determining force from the very first notes. The music contains some of the most powerful and most intimate inventions in Tchaikovsky’s work, and anyone who has ever heard the final scene of Mariya’s decent into madness, will never forget it.

Director Dmitri Tcherniakov for the most part relates opera plots in our present day, often in apparently everyday or intimate settings and situations – and always in stage sets that he conceives and designs down to the very last detail, as he does all other aspects of artistic design (costume, make-up, light, video). The tumult of big actions and great fuss in his stagings appear as if magnified under a microscope. Conflicts play out up close and personal at eye level. As spectators we can never flee into the perspective of a distanced total, but rather the characters pursue us in their imperfection, with their faults, their sometimes successful, sometimes failed attempts at happiness. Tcherniakov has been a regular guest at the Bayerische Staatsoper for many years now, with his stagings of Khovanshchina, Dialogues des Carmélites, Simon Boccanegra, Lulu, Der Freischütz and most recently War and Peace.