The Twilight of the Dreams

Highlights

Johannes Erath creates a site specific performance for the 2021 opening of the Teatro Massimo season, in live streaming, free of charge and accessible worldwide. 

Il Crepuscolo dei Sogni (The Twilight of Dreams) is a site-specific opera by the German visionary director Johannes Erath who is making his debut in Italy and who is also responsible for the show’s dramaturgy and sets. Musical Director Omer Meir Wellber will be conducting. Every corner of the opera house becomes part of a wider stage, under a moonlight that tranforms everything it encounters. The scenic space will be completely transformed by the specifically created sets lit by a lunar light, immersed in a snow that covers and transfigures all shapes and forms. A different place that becomes the landscape of the soul and that recalls today’s condition, that of a disoriented and isolated humanity who has lost all certainties and reference points and is dealing with distances, separations, screens, and new communication modes. Within this suspended set, alternating hope and despondency, art and music remain the highest forms of hope.
Erath and Wellber thus create a musical “Winter Journey” through various moments from different operas, from Rossini to Verdi, from Monteverdi to the Lieder of Schubert and Richard Strauss, with the recurring presence of “Traviata”, whose protagonist is afflicted by a lung disease that reminds us of today’s human sufferings. This journey, that alternates contrasting feelings, culminates with the chorus from the Prologue of Arrigo Boito’s “Mefistofele” which, after showing us the most disenchanted and cynical aspects through Mefistofele’s aria, embodies the spirit that brings back light and hope, and with the final duet from Claudio Monteverdi’s “Incoronazione di Poppea”: two ecstatic moments, divine the first, terrestrial the second.

Photo © Rosellina Garbo