Lucia Ashton falls in love with her family's mortal enemy. She and Edgardo swear eternal fidelity. Lucia's brother Enrico, however, wants to marry her off to a rich heir at all costs. When Lucia finally finds herself abandoned by everyone and her beloved Edgardo reviles and insults her, she murders the husband forced upon her on their wedding night. Pitying her family as insane, Lucia sees her act as a liberation and finally feels close to happiness with her beloved. Lucia di Lammermoor, based on the best-selling novel by Sir Walter Scott, is a pearl of bel canto written by Gaetano Donizetti in 1835 and a vocal and dramatic challenge for any singer.

In Dietrich W. Hilsdorf's psychologically sharply contoured Dresden production, which is reduced to the essentials of human interaction, the spherical soundscape of the glass harmonica opens up the sensitive inner world of an oppressed woman fighting against the rest of the world.