Fine touch, gentle float

During Klaus Zehelein's directorship, the magazine "Opernwelt" voted Stuttgart Opera Primus inter Pares five times. If the prestigious prize now goes to Stuttgart again after ten years, then this is a testament to the high recognition for the work under artistic director Jossi Wieler. Stuttgart - The time was ripe, a long time ago. For at least two years, the team around artistic director Jossi Wieler had been a hot candidate for the best-known award there is in the opera business. "Opera House of the Year": this title, which Stuttgart's most influential opera director, Klaus Zehelein, won for his house no fewer than five times during his 15-year tenure, rewards a uniqueness that the Stuttgart Opera can now claim for itself once again. In 2016, it is based on a balancing act between hermeticism and openness, concentration and diversity, seriousness and playful experimentation - and on a respectful caution in dealing with art and artists. Yet the path to the existing state of artistic bliss was not a straight one. It was the path of an artist: a sensitive director-director who, when he took office, dreamed of a small, self-contained opera Elysium in which he wanted to create something valid and lasting together with firm friends. The fact that he changed course three years later was also the decision of a thoroughly artistic person, because for him failure is not defeat, but always just the end of one path and the beginning of a new one. In 2011, the director Jossi Wieler took over the directorship of the Stuttgart Opera with the aim of countering the rapidly rotating merry-go-round of big names and spectacular events in the opera business with a model that seemed new and yet had already been practiced by the legendary Berlin director-director Walter Felsenstein in the mid-20th century: a concentrated music theater workshop in which a permanent team was to get closer to the core of the magic of opera. Wieler broke up the hermetic nature of his design in 2014: The house director Andrea Moses left, and in her place came directors with very different, mostly strong, independent signatures, and in combination with the productions of Jossi Wieler and his musically, linguistically and historically extremely knowledgeable dramaturge Sergio Morabito, a fertile humus has since resulted on which art grows, thrives and sprouts colorful blossoms. The event of the season: Kirill Serebrennikov's "Salome The most colorful of these last season was certainly Kirill Serebrennikov's exciting and oppressive production of Richard Strauss' "Salome," which in the race for "Production of the Year" at "Opernwelt," by the way, was overtaken only by the monumental event of the season, Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Thursday" from "Licht" in Basel. Instead of turgid eroticism, there was a very contemporary psychological thriller in Stuttgart about a deformed society in times of terror. And one also experienced what has become the trademark of the Haus am Eckensee for years: music theater as togetherness, as a marvel of working together on art. The conductor (Roland Klutting), the state orchestra, the singers (above all Matthias Klink as Herod and Simone Schneider as Salome, both of them also high up in the singer ranking of the professional journal won by Christian Gerhaher), the scenically motivated and integrated video technology: it was all one, and as an audience member of the Stuttgart Opera, one feels this as bundled energy radiating from the stage into the hall. This energy even worked where the efforts of the performers worked on a slightly weakening object, because musically it was a bit sticky: in Philipp Boesmans' opera about Arthur Schnitzler's "Reigen". The excellence of the Stuttgart ensemble of singers (largely nurtured by opera director Eva Kleinitz) was particularly evident here, because director Nicola Hümpel worked out fine character studies with each individual performer; a camera caught the fact that these reached into the smallest twitches of facial expression, and the merging spaces on Oliver Proskes' stage complemented the turbulent-ironic play - an evening for the eyes, also beautiful.

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