What to do when power and strength are fading? King Lear assembles his daughters to divide his realm – a cry for love, unheard by power-hungry ears. Only his youngest daughter Cordelia appreciates him and is cast out immediately. Soon, the older daughters Regan and Goneril become caught up in fierce machinations. The family structure develops into a cyclone of violence and insanity that destroys everything the monarch once loved and that once loved him. Everything that is still alive.

Revolving around a hunger for power and suspicion, jealousy and narcissism, family constraints and the disillusions of old age, Shakespeare’s King Lear is one of the most important works of world literature. Composer Aribert Reimann created a radical piece of musical theatre that has become an opera classic in its own right: With hellishly difficult vocal parts and a huge orchestra, with impulsive rhythms and crystal-clear words, with spectacular effects and a breath-taking theatricality of sounds. Lear was premiered in Munich in 1978 with great success. It brings Shakespeare’s cruel play relentlessly close to us; it moves, impresses and appals. This monumental work, one of the most frequently performed contemporary operas, will now be presented in Hanover for the first time.

The internationally acclaimed vocalists Angela Denoke, Michael Kupfer-Radecky and Nils Wanderer will feature in the main roles, while General Music Director Stephan Zilias takes on the challenge of this complex total machinery. The British team of director Joe Hill-Gibbins, who staged the opera Greek as a “resounding comic” (HAZ) at the State Opera in 2021, and star set-designer Tom Scutt will develop the story in overwhelming images of a modern-abstract aesthetic.