Name: Benjamin, dernière nuit
Start: 2016-03-15T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2016-03-26T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Opéra Nouvel de Lyon

Organization

Festival d'Aix en Provence

Biennale Musiques en Scène

Singer

Jean-Noël Briend

Walter Benjamin

Michaela Kušteková

Asja Lacis

Michaela Selinger

Hannah Arendt

Charles Rice

Arthur Koestler

Scott Wilde

Gershom Sholem

Jeff Martin

Bertolt Brecht

Gilles Ragon

André Gide

Károly Szemerédy

Theodor W Adorno

Tenor

Vincent Ordonneau

Un joueur d'échecs

Conductor

Bernhard Kontarsky

Stage director

John Fulljames

Set designer

Michael Levine

Costume designer

Christina Cunningham

Video designer

Finn Ross

Lighting designer

James Farncombe

Sound designer

Carolyn Downing

Chorus master

Philip White

Choreographer

Maxine Braham

Will Duke

Opéra de Lyon

Others

Lyon Opera Choirs

Orchestra

Lyon Opera Orchestra

Benjamin, dernière nuit

Lyon

France

Opéra Nouvel de Lyon

German-Jewish essayist, philosopher, and critic Walter Benjamin was one of the early 20th century's most influential thinkers, a light in the darkness of looming war and political oppression. In Benjamin, dernière nuit, composer Michel Tabachnik and librettist Régis Debray examine this life cruelly cut short by despair in the face of Nazism. Experience the opera here in its highly acclaimed 2016 premiere production at the Lyon Opera.

Benjamin, dernière nuit begins at the end: with a tableau of the body of Benjamin in a Port-Bou hotel room following his suicide. After the opening scene, the opera returns to earlier in the evening: Benjamin’s arrival at the hotel, greeted by a menacing innkeeper. Informed that the Spanish authorities are coming to deport him back to France and into the hands of the Nazis, he decides to end his life, poisoning himself with an overdose of morphine tablets. Joined on stage by his doppelganger (the Walter Benjamin singer), the actor Benjamin reminisces about meetings with various friends and colleagues (among them Arthur Koestler, Bertolt Brecht, André Gide, Hannah Arendt) from the past year in a morphine-induced reverie, with the singer Benjamin reenacting the past in front of him. The actor Benjamin slowly expires, but the singer survives to the end of the opera, living on as a symbol of the philosopher's contemporary relevance.

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