Strauss's Daphne
Romeo Castellucci (stage director), Thomas Guggeis (conductor) — With René Pape (Peneios), Anna Kissjudit (Gaea), Vera-Lotte Boecker (Daphne) …
Thank you for your understanding.
Cast
Romeo Castellucci — Stage director, costume designer, lighting, scenography
Evelin Facchini — Choreographer
Martin Wright — Chorus Master
Piersandra Di Matteo — Dramaturgy
Jana Beckmann — Dramaturgy
Maxi Menja Lehmann — Assistant stage director
Lisa Behensky — Assistant stage designer
Alessio Valmori — Assistant stage designer
Clara Rosina Straßer — Assistant costume designer
Theresa Wilson — Assistant stage designer
Marco Giusti — Lighting design assistant
René Pape — Peneios
Anna Kissjudit — Gaea
Vera-Lotte Boecker — Daphne
Magnus Dietrich — Leukippos
Pavel Černoch — Apollo
Program notes
Don't miss this rarely heard gem by Richard Strauss: the opera Daphne returns to the Berlin State Opera with Vera-Lotte Boecker and René Pape! In this meticulous staging by Romeo Castellucci, the titular nymph's arboreal metamorphosis takes place against a ghostly backdrop of falling snow, untainted by the bloodshed to come…
This Castellucci production is a thorough reimagining of the work that still keeps the overarching framework of the myth passed down through generations, from Ovid and Plutarch to Strauss and his librettist Joseph Gregor. Under the baton of Thomas Guggeis, the voices of Vera-Lotte Boecker and René Pape (as Daphne and her suitor Leucippe) unite in harmonius celebration of this age-old drama where life and death melt into one another.
Composed between 1936 and 1937 in Dresden, Strauss's work opens on a paean to nature sung by the young nymph Daphne. Unbeknownst to her, the god Apollo (played brilliantly by Pavel Černoch) is listening, mad with desire—but she escapes his clutches through flattery and the intervention of Zeus, who transforms her into a laurel tree, making her one with nature itself. In a final creative exclamation point, Castellucci closes the action with the epigraph from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, perhaps in a nod to our own ecological crisis: "'Sibyl, what do you want?' She answered, 'I want to die.'"
Photo © Monika Rittershaus
