With Paul Hindemith's expressionist opera thriller "Cardillac", the Staatstheater Meiningen presents a masterpiece between obsession with art and moral abyss - a gripping psychodrama that seems more relevant than ever 100 years after its premiere.
Hoffmann's "Das Fräulein von Scuderi" was the first German-language detective story in 1819. 107 years later, Paul Hindemith's "Cardillac" turned the material into an opera thriller in keeping with the tastes of the time: a rhythm-driven three-act play from the 1920s lasting not much more than 90 minutes. The 1926 version of "Cardillac" is performed for the first time in Meiningen exactly 100 years later.
A serial killer is on the loose in Paris, taking his victims' jewelry that they have previously purchased from the respected goldsmith Cardillac. No one suspects that Cardillac himself is the perpetrator, who is unable to part with his art. The goldsmith is a driven man whose murderous madness even affects his daughter's lover.
Hindemith has not only created a dark thriller, but also an artistic drama that focuses on the conflicts between social "normality" and the otherness of the individual. Musically, he mixes sober, matter-of-fact tones with neo-baroque fugue and passacaglia forms in an interplay of movement and statics. With melodic lines and polyphony, the composer focuses on mechanization and objectification in a contradictory time in deliberate contrast to the pathos of emerging National Socialism.
Premiere February 13
Further performances: February 15, March 8, April 17 and 30, May 23, June 5, 2026
