Pagliacci / From one day to the next

Twice adultery, twice theater, twice role-playing and a murder. Co-music theater director and stage director Jasmina Hadžiahmetović combines two congenial operas in this double bill. In Ruggero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci from 1892, the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte provide a rare glimpse behind their masks. They are the members of a comedic traveling troupe who cannot escape their traditional roles. The actress playing the reckless Columbine cheats on her husband Canio, who then stabs her to death on stage. The enthusiastic audience celebrates the gruesome play as fiction.

The couple come to a more peaceful agreement in Schönberg's one-act play Von heute auf morgen, first performed in 1930, for which the composer's second wife wrote the libretto. Here, an argument about entrenched relationship patterns escalates. The wife pretends that her husband is having an affair with a singer. Feelings that have long since grown cold are reawakened, the couple reconcile and love and freedom are reconciled. Between Italian verismo and twelve-tone technique, great lyrical arcs and colorful coloratura, deep tragedy and tongue-in-cheek humor, this evening is a play with the play, a parable rich in perspective on the abysses and heights of acting in life and on stage.