The first joint production of the ballet company and the opera company will take on one of the great classics of opera and ballet history: Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice caused a revolution in 1762. Gluck broke out of his predecessors’ rigid forms and achieved the highest musical effects through concentration and simplicity. An essential component of the plot, which focusses on three characters: choir and ballet.

The new production from Hanover also intends to refine our view of human rituals and processions as well as of Orpheus’ impossible longing to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the realm of the dead. Together with Italian choreographer Diego Tortelli, the Belgian director Lisaboa Houbrecht, who is known for multifaceted and vibrant musical theatre works in her home country, sets out to find light in the dark. And the movements within the “uncanny mine of the soul” (Rainer Maria Rilke).

“Christoph Willibald Gluck was a great innovator: He abandoned his contemporaries’ typical displays of virtuosity and wrote Orfeo ed Euridice, an opera that tells the extraordinary story of these two lovers with unprecedented clarity and purity. The ballet music, too, is governed by refined simplicity and integrated into the story according to the French tradition. It virtually demands for the story to be told through the language of dance.” (Benjamin Bayl, conductor)