Season 2026

THUS THE DYNASTY OF THE GODS PERISHED LIKE A DYING BREATH

“Thus the dynasty of the gods perished like a dying breath”: These words from the final scene of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung serve as the poetic axis of our season. Wagner did not include Brünnhilde’s meaningful verses, which mark the end of divine order and in which she passes on her wisdom to humanity, in his scoring of the Ring des Nibelungen, because “its meaning is already conveyed in the musical setting with utmost precision”, the composer argued.

It is, however, well worthwhile taking a closer look at these words since they also signify that even apparently absolute power systems are transient. What remains, according to Brünnhilde, is love – or even responsibility and human decisions.

The concept of the fall of the gods and what comes after them, shapes our season. It is a reflection on the role of the “divine” or “godly” in today’s world – on authority, ideology, genius, power and the fragile space in which humanity asserts itself when these higher orders disintegrate. Each of our new productions approaches this question from another perspective.

At the core of the season is the completion of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen. With Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, directed by Tobias Kratzer and conducted by General Music Director Vladimir Jurowski, the last two Ring parts reveal the extinguishing of heroic ideals and the collapse of divine order.

Questions of power and legitimation, but also the vulnerability of the prisoners of authoritarian systems, shape Gaetano Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda. A programmatic thread is taken up again here, to which the Königin(nen) musical-theatre performance also links up.

Questions of moral responsibility are asked with Doctor Atomic, the first John Adam’s opera ever to be performed at the Bayerische Staatsoper. As a mythical figure of the 20th century, scientist Robert Oppenheimer also left a legacy whose power carries with it the potential for irreversible destruction.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky's opera, Mazeppa, based on a story by Alexander Pushkin examines family breakdown and a forbidden love. Directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov and conducted by Daniele Rustioni, the tale of the Ukrainian hero, Mazeppa, examines the brutal machinery of power.

In Jules Massenet’s Werther, the inner collapse of ideals assumes a more intimate form. In Werther’s world, social norms and moral maxims replace the divine authority.

The season’s final premiere will be Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice in the Prinzregententheater. The writer Gustav von Aschenbach loses himself here in his obsession with a divine principle of beauty – as an unattainable ideal it does not lead to Platonic transcendence, but rather to dissolution of the self.

“Resistance” is the central theme of the Ja, Mai festival. While in Georg Friedrich Haas’s Koma the focus is on physical resistance, Gordon Kampe’s Die Kreide im Mund des Wolfs gets to grips with political resistance. The world premiere of Liberty by Diana Syrse, based on a libretto by Sofi Oksanen, deals with resistance in the context of domestic violence.

The relationship between humans and the gods and the divine also plays a decisive role in the two ballet premieres – the mythical title hero in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera, Orpheus and Eurydice, staged by Pina Bausch as a dance opera, sets in motion the sacrosanct structures of life and death created by the gods. In Edward Clug’s new narrative ballet, CARPATHIA – Der Mythos der Untoten (The Myth of the Undead), vampirism fits into a world in which the god-given balance must be re-established.

In the great symphonic works of the classical, romance and early modern periods, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester’s concert programmes explore questions of order and dissolution, heroic aspiration and existential fragility.

So, I cordially invite you to peruse the new programme and look forward to so many chats and discussions with you.

Yours, Serge Dorny