No sooner has he been called than Puck comes swooping in. The sprite’s job is to help his master, Oberon, King of the Fairies, to play a mean trick on his wife, Tytania. But in the course of carrying out his task, he manages to create one of the greatest love-based entanglements in the history of world literature.

Kafka’s very dense text explores fundamental issues of solidarity, civil disobedience and people’s willingness to do the right thing. It serves as the point of departure for a work of musical theatre for which Gerhild Steinbuch has penned a libretto. Ostensibly mundane things happen, including little helpful gestures that we take for granted, but as time passes tensions rise: with all the repetition and variation in the sequence of actions, what was first taken to be banal and harmless becomes an existential task and increasingly difficult to sustain … A musical theatre by Andrej Koroliov and Theresa von Halle.

A band of people on the run pause and try to get a grip on what is happening to them. Thus begins Stefan Herheim’s version of the RING OF THE NIBELUNG, the final part of the tetralogy, which winds up the story in the here and now. A game ensues that is fated to end in a form of apocalypse, so that the world can begin again from zero.

The eve of the RING is reserved for mythical figures: Gods, dwarves and giants open the struggle for power that will later also determine the fate of mankind. And already here it becomes clear that the unbridled lust for power ultimately only claims victims. At the centre of Stefan Herheim's new production is the evocation of myth as a human attempt to explain the world to themselves over and over again and to understand their own existence through play ...

Wagner once said that each and every one of the world’s sorrows could find superlative expression in THE VALKYRIE. Nonetheless, the darkest of the RING’s four parts still manages to remain the most popular – thanks in part to the Valkyries, whose Ride is solved by Stefan Herheim in a way that is both surprising and playful.

Rings have always been a symbol of eternity. Beginning merges with end in the circular shape. And so it is in Wagner’s tetralogy, in which the Nibelung has to abjure love before he can smelt the ring from the stolen Rhinegold. The ring represents the dark desire for power and yet, right up to the final redemptive downfall, it is also the highest token of a supreme love.

Rings have always been a symbol of eternity. Beginning merges with end in the circular shape. And so it is in Wagner’s tetralogy, in which the Nibelung has to abjure love before he can smelt the ring from the stolen Rhinegold. The ring represents the dark desire for power and yet, right up to the final redemptive downfall, it is also the highest token of a supreme love.

Rings have always been a symbol of eternity. Beginning merges with end in the circular shape. And so it is in Wagner’s tetralogy, in which the Nibelung has to abjure love before he can smelt the ring from the stolen Rhinegold. The ring represents the dark desire for power and yet, right up to the final redemptive downfall, it is also the highest token of a supreme love.

For 200 years Rossini’s BARBIERE has been held up as the epitome of musical comedy. The archetypes of commedia dell’arte are constantly shimmering through the storyline revolving around the resourceful Figaro – an ambiguity that is not lost in Katharina Thalbach’s vibrant production.

In its mixture of Viennese folk theatre, Masonic mystery and fairy tale, this opera is probably the most frequently performed in the German-speaking world and, in Günter Krämer's colourfully pictorial production, a favourite with our audiences.

Pure Mozart – Rodrigo Garcia, the celebrated and controversial director, presents us with a grotesque world pivoting between lively comedy and sheer craziness. The singing is rendered as a comic strip, the abduction as a trip to a realm of anarchy and banter.