Organization

Conductor

Conductor (+1)

Daniel Cohen

Stage director

Stage director (+1)

Dead Centre

Set designer

Set designer (+2)

Nina Wetzel

Video

Set designer (+1)

Sébastien Dupouey

Lighting designer

Stephen Dodd

Dramaturge

Jörg Königsdorf

Soprano (+1)

Ángeles Blancas Gulín

Lucy

Bass-baritone (+3)

Davide Damiani

Paolo

Mezzo-soprano (+4)

Monica Bacelli

Emilia

Baritone (+6)

Nikolay Borchev

Ospite

Soprano (+2)

Meechot Marrero

Odetta

Tenor (+1)

Andrei Danilov

Pietro

Actor (+1)

Paula D Koch

Baritone

Christoph Schlemmer

Tenor

Eric Naumann

Nelida Martinez

Doris Gruner

Deutsche Oper Berlin

Costume designer

Sound designer

Benjamin Schultz

Orchestra

Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin

“Teorema”, which was released in 1968 as both a film and a novel, is one of the most radical of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s works, as well as being one of the best known. In it Pasolini portrays a fictitious industrialist’s family as a means to analyse the decay of bourgeois society. A young stranger is taken in as a guest and proceeds to seduce every member of the family in turn, all of whom find it subsequently impossible to continue on their rigidly conventional paths. Each of them sets about breaking free in their own way from the straitjacket that has determined the course of their lives thus far. The domestic servant, Emilia, finds relief in faith, the son embraces the life of an artist, the daughter goes mad, the mother seeks indiscriminate sexual encounters and the patriarch renounces all possessions.

No lesser artist than the great German composer Hans Werner Henze recognised the potential of “Teorema” for the musical-theatre genre and secured the rights to the material, though he did not write the opera himself. As Head of the Munich Biennale, Henze entrusted the musical composition to the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli, who had already created international ripples with his experimental opera entitled EXPERIMENTUM MUNDI. In 1992 he delivered an initial version of TEOREMA in the form of a chamber opera with mute actors. Today, 30 years later, Battistelli has gone back to the material and created a full-length opera featuring singers and a large orchestra, an opus informed by the experience of scoring works such as RICHARD III and most recently GIULIO CESARE, which have earned him a reputation as one of the greatest living composers of opera.

On the production
IL TEOREMA DI PASOLINI is the first work to be produced by the British-Irish theatre collective Dead Centre for the stage of an opera house. Dead Centre have made a name for themselves as a remarkable directorial team with international festival appearances that have included productions for the Wiener Burgtheater and the Schaubühne Berlin. Their staging of Olga Neuwirth’s opera BÄHLAMMS FEST for the 2019 Ruhrtriennale was their first venture into musical theatre. Their work is characterised by illusionist effects that blur the boundary between fiction and reality and present on-stage action in a cinematic way.

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