gore galore

     At the Schiller Theater in Berlin

the Schiller Theater

intermission

      The Berlin Staatsoper on Unter den Linden was supposed to reopen this year, but the facelift on the opera house is apparently behind schedule and the Staats is still using the small Schiller Theater on Bismarckstrasse. It's great for us because it's an easy walk from our rental flat.

view from the cheap seats

      We attended our second show, a Sunday afternoon matinee of Karl Maria von Weber's opera "Der Freischütz," (The Sharpshooter) based on a German folk legend. This is not a well known opera and is performed mostly in Germany where they are fond of legends: old folk legends like this one, and legends of Nordic gods and heroes as in Richard Wagner's “Ring of the Nibelung” cycle.

     They start their children on opera young here, the audience was full of kids of various ages. Being kids they probably enjoyed the gruesome scene where a wolf is disemboweled in a kind of black mass ceremony to make a deal with the devil, a Faustian bargain—fantastically well staged with red light, wet looking organs from the chest cavity of the wolf, fake blood, dry ice for an eerie underworld effect. Lot's of fun!

the conductor, cast and chorus of "Der Freischütz"