Romeo und Julia

Romeo sees Julia, and his fate is sealed. He loves this young woman with all his heart and soul – and when he speaks to her, she immediately feels the same immense love for him. It would be such an alignment of the stars, if their two families hadn’t been bitter enemies for simply forever. Old hate meets a young love, that wants to create a new world ...

Shakespeare’s classic tells of a generation that inherits a conflict, that it didn’t cause, but which it answers with love as an act of resistance. Gounod’s 1867 opera shifts the conflict into the inner lives of the characters and portrays this love as a lyrical psychological drama, from its germination to its utmost ecstasy, through to its shocking end. Herbert Föttinger’s staging sets it in the belle époque, shortly before the First World War. Ideological extremes and solidified power structures rule in Verona. Can the lovers’ death in such an environment bring reconciliation, or is it the dreadful result of political reality?