2022/2023 season

SONGS OF WAR AND LOVE

Perhaps we are right now in a moment hovering between an old world that is vanishing, and a new world as it emerges. At a historical turning point, in a time of expectation, in this, "tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being,” as Roland Barthes said. Whether Così fan tutte, Lohengrin, War and Peace, Aida, Dido & Aeneas / Expectation, Hamlet or Semele: In many works coming to the stage in the 2022-2023 season’s new stagings, the characters are in a state of expectation, each in their own way. As Barthes writes in A Lover's Discourse: Fragments: “There is a scenography of expectation: I define it, I manipulate it, I remove a piece of time, in which I playfully present the loss of the love object and evoke a little sorrow. This plays out like a theatrical piece.” Dorabella and Fiordiligi, Elsa, Radamès, the Woman, Hamlet – all wait, caught between hope and despair. Semele also waits with unrestrained impatience for Jupiter to turn her into a goddess. And dies of it.

War and love, guiding principles of our 2022-2023 season, appear to be diametrically opposed, but at the same time both are characterised by a complex dynamic and high density of events – by the change of states, the view of tomorrow, the union of bodies, the communitisation, the divisiveness, the hope. They’ve accompanied people since the beginning of time. “War is like love: it always finds a way” (Bertolt Brecht). War, the wars, have never left our earth. We are again experiencing their terrible dimensions. But love has always remained, sometimes far too close to hate: “Love is a crisis, that leaves reluctance behind. […] I am your lover, and therefore your enemy.” (Cesare Pavese) Love and war are interwoven, and in art, too, there is scarcely any love poetry without war metaphors. Together with our conductors and directors, in the coming season we will trace the songs of war and love in musical theatre. With artistic personalities already well known in Munich, such as General Music Director Vladimir Jurowski, Principal Guest Conductor Daniele Rustioni, Claus Guth, Stefano Montanari, Dmitri Tcherniakov and Krzysztof Warlikowski, and with those who are guests with us at the Bayerische Staatsoper for the first time, such as Neil Armfield, Lotte van den Berg, Andrew Manze, Damiano Michieletto and Christopher Rüping, as well as François Xavier Roth, who will conduct an opera for the first time.

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War is like love: it always finds a way

_{- Bertolt Brecht}