MEYERBEER: DIE HUGENOTTEN (“Les Huguenots”) BLU-RAY ARTHAUS

Giacomo Meyerbeer
DIE HUGENOTTEN
Deutsche Oper Berlin, 1991
Soloists: Angela Denning, Richard Leech, Lucy Peacock
Orchestra, Chorus: Chor und Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin
Conductor: Stefan Soltesz
Director: John Dew
The grand opera “Les Huguenots” was one of the greatest operatic successes of the 19th century, and its creator was hailed as the foremost composer of his time. Yet today, he is largely forgotten by the opera-going public and his works lie gathering dust in opera house repertories around the world. “Les Huguenots” was performed at the opening in 1858 of the new Covent Garden Opera in London. However, it was a performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1890 which went into the history books. In the German translations by Ignatz Franz Castelli (1837 Vienna) and Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer (1838 Munich), the conflict between Catholics and Protestants was heavily disguised; a new version was created by Gustaf Gründgens and Julius Kapp in Berlin in 1932. And John Dew’s modern production caused something of a sensation when it was first performed in 1987 at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin. Giving the period and content of the work new reference points, his staging becomes almost oppressively contemporaneous: he sets the opera in a divided Berlin, where the wall is a symbol of the separation of the two German states.