A young person named Simplicius Simplicissimus goes alone into a world marked by destruction, violence and mistrust. Simplicius observes and asks uncomfortable questions in order to understand suffering and inhumanity around him. Based on the baroque novel by Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen from 1669, the German composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann wrote his chamber opera “Simplicius Simplicissimus” from 1934 to 1935. It is set in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, but at the time it pointed to the horrors of the Nazi dictatorship and made Hartmann’s anti-fascist standpoint clear. Due to censorship and Hartmann’s decision to emigrate internally, »Simplicius Simplicissimus« could only be premiered in Germany after the end of World War II, in 1948. The revised second version for large orchestra was performed for the first time in 1957 at the Nationaltheater Mannheim. Director Markus Dietz, who most recently staged »Peter Grimes« on the NTM, brings Hartmann’s work into the present and questions what a destroyed world does to the people living in it. The second version of “Simplicius Simplicissimus” will be performed in a version for chamber orchestra under the musical direction of Johannes Kalitzke

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Modern Opera

FULL Simplicius Simplicissimus (Hartmann) Mannheim 2021 Kessler Stoughton Eikötter

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