DAPHNE Berlin 2023 René Pape, Anna Kissjudit, Vera-Lotte Boecker, Magnus Dietrich, Pavel Černoch

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Daphne  
• Composer: Strauss Richard  
• Libretto: Joseph Gregor    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, Germany  
• Recorded: March 25, 2023
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: René Pape, Anna Kissjudit, Vera-Lotte Boecker, Magnus Dietrich, Pavel Černoch
• Conductor: Thomas Guggeis  
• Orchestra: Staatskapelle Berlin  
• Chorus: Staatsopernchor Berlin  
• Chorus Master: Martin Wright  
• Choreographer: Evelin Facchini  
• Stage Director: Romeo Castellucci  
• Stage Designer: Romeo Castellucci  
• Costume Designer: Romeo Castellucci  
• Lighting Designer: Romeo Castellucci  

Information about the Recording

• Published by: medici.tv, Unitel  
• Date Published: 2023  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: nosubs  
• Video Recording from: medici     FULL VIDEO
•  
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

Quote from medici.tv:

Don’t miss this rarely heard gem by Richard Strauss: the opera Daphne returns to the Berlin State Opera with Vera-Lotte Boecker and René Pape! In this meticulous staging by Romeo Castellucci, the titular nymph’s arboreal metamorphosis takes place against a ghostly backdrop of falling snow, untainted by the bloodshed to come…

This Castellucci production is a thorough reimagining of the work that still keeps the overarching framework of the myth passed down through generations, from Ovid and Plutarch to Strauss and his librettist Joseph Gregor. Under the baton of Thomas Guggeis, the voices of Vera-Lotte Boecker and René Pape (as Daphne and her suitor Leucippe) unite in harmonius celebration of this age-old drama where life and death melt into one another.

Composed between 1936 and 1937 in Dresden, Strauss’s work opens on a paean to nature sung by the young nymph Daphne. Unbeknownst to her, the god Apollo (played brilliantly by Pavel Černoch) is listening, mad with desire—but she escapes his clutches through flattery and the intervention of Zeus, who transforms her into a laurel tree, making her one with nature itself. In a final creative exclamation point, Castellucci closes the action with the epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, perhaps in a nod to our own ecological crisis: “‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ She answered, ‘I want to die.'”