SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTIONS

For the first premiere of the 2023/24 season, two chamber operas entitled »Majesty & Madness« were not performed on the stage of Oper Leipzig, but in the auditorium. Peter Maxwell Davies' works »Eight Songs for a Mad King« and »Miss Donnithorne's Maggot« brought the fateful stories of King George III and Miss Donnithorne to life in an impressive way. In eight haunting songs each, Davies conveyed the madness and despair of these tragic figures.

What was special about this production was the exciting choice of the "new" venue and the creative set design for the changed stage situation. The empty auditorium, criss-crossed by walkways, was transformed into a panopticon from our theater and material collection: old chairs, cakes and dead deer, historical picture frames as well as dusty flowers and candlesticks created a fascinatingly morbid setting. In addition, items on loan from the Schauspielhaus and Heidelberg Theatre enriched the atmosphere with forest flooring and enchanted lianas, perfectly rounding off the unique atmosphere.

The 18-year-old widow Mary Stuart returns to Scotland to rule as queen, but her brother claims the throne while the Scottish lords work against her. She marries a drunkard and is expecting a child by him, while the Scottish people are thrown into turmoil by lies. Defenceless, raped and suspected of murdering her husband, her only option in the end is to flee to England, into the arms of her greatest adversary. In her play »Mary, Queen of Scots«, which premiered in 1978, Thea Musgrave describes the young queen's harsh confrontation with unrelenting power. Musgrave's haunting music and powerful staging convey the energy-sapping loneliness of this extraordinary personality.

With the »Fonds Zero«, the Federal Cultural Foundation aims to support cultural institutions in testing climate-neutral forms of production and new aesthetics with the lowest possible impact on the climate. In this way, an exemplary contribution is to be made to a reorientation of the German cultural landscape in order to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in the long term. Through the innovative use of our theater construction kit and the exclusive use of used materials from our warehouses, we were able to meet these requirements and realize »Mary, Queen of Scots« as our first climate-neutral production.