The performance at the Staatstheater Cottbus will be based on the newly published critical first edition by Antony Beaumont. This is a newly discovered and previously unperformed version of the opera, which Zemlinsky created for the Mannheim Theater in 1913.
Gottfried Keller's humorous novella about the poor little tailor who harbours exuberant desires, appears as an impostor in the neighboring village and is finally exposed by the crowd is widely known as a reading from German lessons. Alexander von Zemlinsky turned it into an opera full of charm, wit and psychological empathy, in which there is far more than just moralizing about appearance and reality. The tailor Wenzel Strapinski does not slip into the role of a Polish count out of greed, but rather passively surrenders to the attributions of the citizens of Goldach, who project their own desires onto him - not without hating him for it at the same time.
In his production, Stephan Märki traces the diverse themes in this story, which tells of the discrepancy between self-perception and public perception, dream and reality, but which is also about the fate of an artist and a painful experience of being an outsider.
Zemlinsky, born in Vienna in 1871 and a friend of Gustav Mahler, composed a beguilingly colorful, late-romantic, overflowing music in which the entire spectrum of the fin de siècle is magically refracted - and which at the same time paved the way for modernism.
Premiere January 25, 2025
Further performances: January 28, February 28, March 27, April 19 and May 28, 2025
