Organization

Admin

Bavarian State Opera

Conductor

Conductor (+2)

Antonino Fogliani

Stage director

Stage director (+4)

Johannes Erath

Set designer

Set designer (+1)

Kaspar Glarner

Costume designer

Lighting designer

Lighting designer (+1)

Olaf Freese

Video

Lea Heutelbeck

Dramaturge

Dramaturge (+1)

Malte Krasting

Chorusmaster

Chorusmaster (+3)

Stellario Fagone

Bass-baritone (+5)

Erwin Schrott

Massimiliano

Tenor (+3)

Charles Castronovo

Carlo

Soprano (+2)

Lisette Oropesa

Amalia

Tenor (+6)

Kevin Conners

Arminio

Tansel Akzeybek

Rolla

Bass (+3)

Roman Chabaranok

Moser

Orchestra

Bavarian State Orchestra

Chorus

Bayerische Staatsoper Chorus

Munich Opera Festival

Nationaltheater Munich

Baritone (+4)

Alfredo Daza

Francesco

A famous Verdi piece that hardly anyone knows. A plot bursting under high-pressure from the very beginning. A work, incandescent with love and hate, about people searching for a valve to release their passion, with arias that can scarcely be controlled with their emotional abundance. A German story as an Italian opera: Verdi wrote I masnadieri for a libretto based on Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers. Karl and Franz become Carlo and Francesco; instead of combating social grievances as in the play, in the opera all the characters struggle to keep up with a family story that is laden with early loss and brotherly rivalry, with suppressed desire and misunderstood needs. Slander, blackmail and knife fights become the stuff of the confrontation. The political conflict of The Robbers is intensified on the personal level in Verdi’s opera. It’s not the age that appears to be decrepit, it’s the people. As a commissioned work by Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, I masnadieri was the first opera that Verdi wrote for a theatre outside of Italy, a work during the upheaval at the end of his “galley years”. In his Macbeth created almost in parallel the fissures are already breaking open; in I masnadieri the subterranean fault lines are just about to explode – a tension that is expressed with every beat of the music, in the solos just as much as in the famous robber choirs. Johannes Erath, who had already staged Un ballo in maschera in Munich with an interpretation that profoundly explores the characters, stages this opera as a chamber play of overflowing dimensions.

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