Vivaldi in Sweden: shipwreck, wild bears, monsters

The forest backdrop is one of the most beautiful stage sets in the originally preserved baroque palace theater in Drottningholm, Sweden.

Precisely painted leaves, branches and trunks of deciduous trees result in a dense forest on the perspectively arranged side wings, which envelops the opera characters in graduated natural tones at a stage depth of twenty meters.

When the flutes in the orchestra then imitate the voices of birds and the opera hero indulges in poetic moods, the illusion completes itself. The forest as a place of rest or terror is a topos in many baroque operas.

After Drottningholm, the stage design fits particularly well, because summery Sweden enchants as a land of lakes and forests.

No drought, no forest fires are irritating here, rich green and dark blue everywhere,

Current opera production is appealing for a number of reasons.

First for the music: “Giustino” by Antonio Vivaldi from 1724;

one of his most popular works with gripping and sentimentally touching arias.

The composer equipped his

with partly new, partly used arias from earlier operas.

The quote from the violin concerto “Spring” is immediately recognizable, as is the languorous aria “Vedrò con mio diletto”, which today is part of the core repertoire for countertenors.

A special feature, due to the

, are the historically appropriate costumes, wigs and the way the singers play with eighteenth-century gestures.

Contrary to what one might think, the use of historical means does not merely demonstrate a courtly convention.

Baroque opera is always about going beyond, even breaking with conventions, about the threat to orderly coexistence through human passions and exceptional situations.

In "Giustino" there are shipwrecks, wild bears and monsters, but above all there is greed, jealousy, excessive ambition, slander, violence against women.

Love too, yes, but it is also threatened and would not come into play at all if not for a

finally discovered a brother who had been believed dead and thus made forgiveness and pacification possible.

The conductor George Petrou is convinced that the Drottningholm Palace Theater from 1766 has a living soul, as he stressed in an interview with the FAZ.

He enthusiastically introduces the backstage area and points to the original wood and cable technology under the stage: “This is the center of the performance, this is where the scene changes take place.

They don't need four seconds, just strong arms that pull the ropes.” Wind machine, rain machine, wave machine, thunder machine have nothing in the museum for Petrou, but connect the stage directly with the audience in a sensual way.

He fell in love with the gently trickling sound of the rain machine so much that he put it on the stage to an aria in which the strings talked about “rain of tears” to the pizzicato and had it gently turned by two mute servants.