O Fortuna

"Pagliacci" drama in two acts and a prologue by Ruggero Leoncavallo | libretto by the composer | "Carmina Burana" ballet by Andreas Heise | music by Carl Orff

Duration 2 1/2 hours | 1 intermission | ages 14 and up

O Fortuna - the wheel of fate turns unpredictably, throws people upwards, hurls them into the abyss. But is everything really predestined? Choreographer and director Andreas Heise and co-director Marlene Hahn interweave Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" - a story of jealousy, obsession and deadly violence - with Carl Orff's archaic "Carmina Burana". The clown wears a mask, but things are bubbling under the surface. Where song meets movement, cracks appear in the fabric - between appearance and reality, between art and brute force.

Inspired by the aesthetics of silent film and the dubious entertainment cultures of the 1920s and 30s, a world of the grotesque, absurd and frivolous emerges. Song, movement and music interpenetrate, merging into a kaleidoscopic image of those places where the mask is crumbling. Artistic freedom tips over into obsession, desire into violence, the game becomes deadly serious. What is staging, what is reality? Where does the pose end, where does naked emotion begin?

"O Fortuna" brings the opera ensemble and the Leipzig Ballet together in an evening that asks: How much do we trust what we see, and what is actually still real here?