Fidelio

Director Nikolaus Habjan has staged Beethoven's only opera to be premiered in Vienna and created a timeless view of the work that stands above a specific era. In this production, Leonore and Florestan are each doubled by a puppet, split, as it were, into an inner life, an expression of the soul and an outer figure. Leonore's agonizing state of tension between intense emotionality and the pressure to conceal her true identity is thus made clear. "If you think about what Beethoven wanted with his works, you always come across a great idealization. And such an idealization stands above a specific epoch. That's why I want to create something that is ultimately independent of time. The less I try to set the plot in a narrow, temporally or politically precise situation, the more timeless the work becomes. It's about the big themes that Beethoven deals with, and you can understand them quite clearly without using a historical frame of reference." (Nikolaus Habjan)