Dmitri Schostakowitsch

Die Nase

Introduction at 6.50 pm

One morning, the barber Yakovlevich finds a nose in his breakfast sandwich. At the same time, the assessor Kovalyov looks in the mirror – and finds that his nose is gone. The barber tries to get rid of the nose; Kovalyov tries to find it, and encounters it, large as life, at the cathedral. It is wearing a uniform, wants nothing to do with its owner, and disappears. Kovalyov wanders around town, thinking it is all a bad dream. Or is he the victim of a conspiracy? At any rate, the “mechanism of petit-bourgeois gossip” has cranked into high gear, and soon the entire city is awash with talk about the incident. When the opera was written, Shostakovich was only 22 years old. He loved animated films, worked at a cinema as a pianist, was deeply impressed by Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” and applied the mercurial editing technique of films to opera.

Director: Karin Beier
Set Designer: Stéphane Laimé
Costume Designer: Eva Dessecker
Choreography: Altea Garrido
Dramaturgy: Christian Tschirner
Video: Meika Dresenkamp, Severin Renke
Lighting Designer: Hartmut Litzinger

Premiere: September 7th, 2019

No break

In German with German and English surtitles
Supported by the Foundation for the Support of the Hamburg State Opera