Kleider machen Leute - Schedule, Program & Tickets
Kleider machen Leute
State Opera Choir
State Opera Orchestra
The Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky possessed a keen sense of ironic humour. He found in the story by the Swiss author Gottfried Keller from the collection The People of Seldwyla, in which allegorical strands of fairy tales, satire and irony mix, ideal material for his opera Dresses Make People, a musical comedy about hypocrisy. Zemlinsky tells the adventures of the tailor's apprentice Wenzel Strapinski, who arrives in a small provincial town whose inhabitants mistake him for a count because of his fashionable clothes and noble use of language. The local notables pamper the newcomer, invite him to lavish parties and shower him with gifts. Strapinski even gets engaged to the city manager's daughter, who falls in love with the mysterious romantic stranger...
How does the story about the clothes that make a man end? With rich rhythmic motifs, striking harmonic inversions and combinations of orchestral colors, Zemlinsky's music wittily reflects the provincial town's microworld, its inhabitants, their selfishness, stupidity and envy, the banality of their conversations and even such details as the smell of coffee and tobacco smoke. "I sew and sew, we need citizens and dandies in tails, soldiers, doctors and all the others! Clothes make the man,” sings Zemlinsky's hero, whose folk melody runs through the opera as the central musical and semantic leitmotif.
The original version of the opera was premiered in 1910 at the Vienna Volksoper under the baton of the composer himself. In 1922, Zemlinsky presented her revised version at the New German Theater (now the State Opera) in Prague, where he held the post of opera director. Now, more than a century later, the play returns to the place where its second and final version premiered. Our new adaptation of Clothes Make People was directed by Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen, which was celebrated in Berlin (Komische Oper), Amsterdam, Zurich, Graz etc.
Subject to change.
State Opera Orchestra
The Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky possessed a keen sense of ironic humour. He found in the story by the Swiss author Gottfried Keller from the collection The People of Seldwyla, in which allegorical strands of fairy tales, satire and irony mix, ideal material for his opera Dresses Make People, a musical comedy about hypocrisy. Zemlinsky tells the adventures of the tailor's apprentice Wenzel Strapinski, who arrives in a small provincial town whose inhabitants mistake him for a count because of his fashionable clothes and noble use of language. The local notables pamper the newcomer, invite him to lavish parties and shower him with gifts. Strapinski even gets engaged to the city manager's daughter, who falls in love with the mysterious romantic stranger...
How does the story about the clothes that make a man end? With rich rhythmic motifs, striking harmonic inversions and combinations of orchestral colors, Zemlinsky's music wittily reflects the provincial town's microworld, its inhabitants, their selfishness, stupidity and envy, the banality of their conversations and even such details as the smell of coffee and tobacco smoke. "I sew and sew, we need citizens and dandies in tails, soldiers, doctors and all the others! Clothes make the man,” sings Zemlinsky's hero, whose folk melody runs through the opera as the central musical and semantic leitmotif.
The original version of the opera was premiered in 1910 at the Vienna Volksoper under the baton of the composer himself. In 1922, Zemlinsky presented her revised version at the New German Theater (now the State Opera) in Prague, where he held the post of opera director. Now, more than a century later, the play returns to the place where its second and final version premiered. Our new adaptation of Clothes Make People was directed by Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen, which was celebrated in Berlin (Komische Oper), Amsterdam, Zurich, Graz etc.
Subject to change.
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