Libretto by Felice Romani
In Italian with German subtitles
Vincenzo Bellini's fame is founded on his long-flowing, harmonically expansive melodic lines. Yet the Sicilian opera composer also impressed his audience with energetic discharges, such as the »barbaric« war chorus in »Norma« and the martial duet, »Suoni la tromba« (Sound the trumpet) in »I Puritani«. He shows both faces of his art in the extraordinary Romeo and Juliet opera that will be performed in Weimar.
The play tells, in very different terms to Shakespeare, not of the skirmishes between two hostile families within a city republic, but of a bloody civil war in its final stages: Verona is an ethnically cleansed Capulet enclave where Giulietta's family has entrenched itself. The sweetness and lyricism that blossom in the lovers' duets (Romeo is composed for a mezzo-soprano!) are thwarted by the events of the war; as a ruthless warrior who has slain Giulietta's brother in battle, Romeo is much more likely to belong to the violent male counter-world in which Giulietta must assert herself as the only woman. In the process, she puts her lover's claim to possession, who abuses love as a continuation of war by other means, in its place, as well as her father, driven by a thirst for revenge, and her bridegroom Tebaldo. A key role in the chain of events leading to the couple's double suicide is performed by the doctor Lorenzo, who is given his own narrative sphere in the interludes – veritable »arias without words« with instrumental solos by horn, violoncello and clarinet.
For the directing team, dealing with »Romeo and Juliet« means continuing an intensive examination of Vincenzo Bellini's operatic output, which began in 2002 with »Norma« at the Stuttgart State Opera and was continued with »La sonnambula« in 2012 and »I puritani« in 2016.
Since 1994, the Swiss director Jossi Wieler, who has won numerous national and international awards, has been working with the German stage and costume designer Anna Viebrock and the German-Italian musical theater dramaturge Sergio Morabito. The team is now responsible for a total of 23 productions, many of which were created in Stuttgart, including under the directorship of Jossi Wieler himself, who headed the Stuttgart Opera House from 2011 to 2018.
They respond to the challenge of the most diverse works by inventing ever new theatrical worlds, which have been recognized with numerous prizes and awards; four times, for example, they created the »Performance of the Year« of the magazine »Opernwelt«, as determined by an international jury of critics.
