Michael Kupfer-Radecky

Jeanine, an earnest theatre director, has been given the task of remounting her former mentor’s most famous work, the opera Salome. Haunted by dark and disturbing memories from her past, she allows her repressed trauma to color the present as she re-enters the opera world after so many years away.

Opening the 2026 Bayreuth Festival in its 150th anniversary year, this live stream presents Wagner’s Rienzi, his early grand opera and once his greatest success, in the Festspielhaus for the first time. The staging is entrusted to award-winning directors Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka, while Nathalie Stutzmann conducts a superb cast led by Heldentenor Andreas Schager in the title role, with Gabriela Scherer as Irene and Jennifer Holloway as Adriano. With its massed choruses, public spectacle and private tragedy, Rienzi promises to open this landmark Bayreuth Festival in unmissable style.

Seeking revenge for her sister’s suicide, Violanta vows to have her seducer killed. As hatred turns to love, can they still escape the deadly fate she has plotted herself? Set during the carnival in Venice, Violanta is Korngold’s second opera, composed at the tender age of 17. This production marks Violanta’s Italian premiere over a hundred years after its creation, contributing to its well-deserved rediscovery.

Herod lusts after his stepdaughter Salome and insists on seeing her dance. Salome longs to kiss the mouth of the imprisoned John the Baptist – a prophet of doom who loses himself in hate speech.

Gathered in the Scottish Highlands, the spirits grant the vampire, Lord Ruthwen, another year of life on the condition he sacrifices three young women within 24 hours. Although a young man Aubry knows Ruthwen is a vampire, he is sworn to secrecy. When the young man’s own lover Malwina is about to become the vampire’s next victim, Aubry has to choose between saving his bride or remaining true to his oath. Der Vampyr is by a formative figure in Hanover's musical life; the composer Heinrich Marschner led the theatre that preceded the Staatsoper, as Royal Hanoverian Kapellmeister and Intendant, for almost three decades from 1831. Marschner adapted John Polidori's novella ‘The Vampyre’, which was modelled on British dandy and writer Lord Byron. Our fascination with the bloodsucking outsider is still as strong two centuries later. Brilliant German director Ersan Mondtag and his team explore social outsiderness and the curse of immortality.