Penthesilea

In the organizer's words:

A woman and a man, united by a politically pointless war, obsessed with defeating the other: The Amazon Penthesilea and the Greek Achilles. When Heinrich von Kleist turned this ancient myth into a play in 1808, he reversed the gruesome ending of the story: It is not Achilles who slays Penthesilea and then falls in love with the dead woman's body, but Penthesilea who falls in love with Achilles, kills him and mangles his corpse.
Kleist's tragedy irritated his contemporaries: Eroticism and aggression seem interchangeable, women fight like men, hunters become prey and Penthesilea an animal. This is not how Kleist's contemporaries imagined either antiquity or the theater. It didn't help that the cruelest scenes are not shown on stage, but only reported: Penthesilea was never performed during the author's lifetime. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that this unconventional work found interest and understanding.
In 2015, French composer Pascal Dusapin turned Kleist's tragedy into an opera about violence and war, trauma and obsession - and the utopian possibility of overcoming all of this through loving encounters. In haunting scenes that focus on the essentials, the music follows the deepest fears, longings and aggressions of the two main characters, penetrating into their inner bodies and allowing us to follow the external struggle at the same time.
This season, the Hanover State Opera is embarking on a three-year intensive exploration of Pascal Dusapin's work.