Detlev Glanert’s opera Caligula - UK premier production

Recorded recently at English National Opera, the Coliseum, London

Saturday 7 July 2012 at 18.00 UK time

Based upon Albert Camus’s existentialist response to the rise of Hitler and Stalin, Detlev Glanert’s 2006 opera – ‘perhaps the finest German opera of the 21st century’ (Tempo) – offers a disturbing insight into the self-destructive logic driving a decadent and dangerous dictatorship.  Young Australian director Benedict Andrews highlights the timeliness of the opera’s themes by setting his UK premiere production in a football stadium, the kind of vast public arena within which dictators habitually play out their political games.

‘Caligula is not a madman,’ says composer Detlev Glanert, ‘but rather an intelligent, rational creature who skilfully experiments with human beings, just like Stalin or Hitler.’ (see him explain on Youtube) The Roman emperor Caligula’s descent into madness is sparked by the death of his sister and lover, Drusilla and the opera depicts the ways in which Caligula’s challenges to those around him test the boundaries of their loyalty to the office of emperor, to him personally, and to each other. Demanding that his former slave Helicon brings him the moon, he enacts absurd and brutal laws. He rapes the wife of one of the senators and forces another to drink poison; appearing at some festivities as Venus, he decides to marry the moon, commanding his guests to worship him. Summoning four poets to entertain the assembly, he arbitrarily sentences them to death; the guests are provoked into conspiring to kill him, but Caligula tricks them with false news of his own demise. His wife Caesonia proposes her own death, at his own hands, as the ultimate proof of her love; the conspirators finally put Caligula to death.

 iPlayer time now expired

Caligula…..Peter Coleman-Wright (baritone)
Caesonia…..Yvonne Howard (mezzo-soprano)
Helicon…..Christopher Ainslie (countertenor)
Cherea…..Pavlo Hunka (bass-baritone)
Scipio…..Carolyn Dobbin (mezzo-soprano)
Mucius…..Brian Galliford (tenor)
Mereia/Lepidus…..Eddie Wade (baritone)
Livia…..Julia Sporsen (soprano)

English National Opera Chorus
English National Opera Orchestra, Conductor…..Ryan Wigglesworth

DURATION: 2 HOURS, 40 MINUTES

video from ENO

Review from The Guardian

Review from The Telegraph

Review from The Arts Desk with interesting reader comments

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