FRANKFURT — In the lobby of Oper Frankfurt, a poster proclaims that the company’s orchestra was recognized by Opernwelt as one of Germany’s Orchestras of the Year in 2025 for the second year in a row. A coat-check attendant’s T-shirt listed the seven years between 1996 and 2024 during which the company had been named Opera House of the Year by the same magazine. Three operas over as many evenings the last weekend in January revealed the reasons why. They also showed the breadth of American talent active in Frankfurt.
The Frankfurt premiere of a Baroque rarity, Agostino Steffani’s Amor vien dal destino, had a historical link to the city. The Italian polymath, who had parallel careers as a priest, diplomat, and composer, died here in 1728 while on a diplomatic mission and is buried in the city’s cathedral. Born in Italy, Steffani trained in Paris under Lully and worked mainly in Germany. He was particularly supportive of the young Handel, whose vocal and chamber music were strongly influenced by his mentor’s melodic style.
Amor vien dal destino is the 11th of Steffani’s 14 three-act operas, which he composed between 1681 and 1709 for Munich, Hanover, and Düsseldorf. He wrote this work in the 1690s while serving as Kapellmeister in Hanover. The opera was not staged there for financial reasons, and its premiere came in Düsseldorf in 1709. Steffani and his librettist, Ortensio Mauro, based the opera on an episode from Virgil’s Aeneid in which Enea and Turno vie for the beautiful Lavinia. After numerous twists and turns, including the threat of death hanging over Lavinia’s father, Latinus, Enea prevails and is united with Lavinia.
The American director R.B. Schlather has been acclaimed for his work in the U.S., including his stagings of David Hertzberg’s The Wake World (the second winner of the MCANA Award for Best New Opera, in 2018) for Opera Philadelphia and Barber’s Vanessa for Heartbeat Opera. Schlather is a master of creating stage magic out of basically nothing, which he again demonstrated in Amor vien dal destino. The action takes place on a bare stage covered in artificial green grass carpeting, from which fire pits emerge to underscore the opera’s more dramatic moments. Costumes are of the period, with that of Giove, the king of the gods, the most spectacular, with its magnificent plumed headdress.
Steffani’s score is a gorgeous stream of ornate, lyrical melodies, recitatives, and duets, which were performed to perfection by an engaging young cast. Recitatives form almost 80 percent of the score, but Steffani’s setting of text is so natural, and his vocal lines so lyrical, that they masquerade as melodies.
As Lavinia, soprano Margherita Maria Sala spun Steffani’s musical lines with a silvery tone that ached with emotion, heightened by her particularly lovely and delicate ornamentation. Mezzo-soprano Karolina Makuła in the trouser role of Turno dominated the stage with her fiery intensity and commanding vocal presence.
Turno’s rival was Michael Porter as Enea, one of two contrasting American tenors who shone in their roles. Porter was a distinctly human Trojan hero, guided by doubt as much as destiny. His lyric tenor sensitively caressed arias and recitatives alike. In the comedic travesti role of Nicea, Lavinia’s nurse, Theo Lebow was arch and wise, cavorting and conspiring with bass-baritone Pete Thanapat’s equally winning Corebo.
The Czech Baroque specialist Václav Luks led the orchestra in a fleet, transparent reading. The orchestral colors were a pure delight, beginning with a continuo that included two lutes, harp, cembalo, and psaltery, a plucked string instrument similar to a zither. Even rarer colors were provided by a quartet of chalumeaux, a single-reed woodwind instrument that was the predecessor to the modern-day clarinet.
Barrie Kosky’s production of Carmen has divided critics and audiences alike since its premiere in Frankfurt in 2015. Sold-out houses for the revival were indicative of the enduring appeal of the production and its engaging young cast, who not only sang Bizet’s music with aplomb but were at ease with Kosky’s approach. Youth, or at least a high level of fitness, is a prerequisite for negotiating a set comprising only 16 steep steps.
Kosky’s high-energy, revue-style transformation of Bizet’s opera is not for purists. It is, nonetheless, a good show, with its intimacy and impact perhaps best enjoyed in the modest proportions of Oper Frankfurt, which seats 1,370, rather than a house double the size.
Kosky encased Bizet’s score in a Weimar-style aesthetic with an emphasis on a fast-paced cabaret style. The gorilla was stolen wholesale from Kander and Ebb’s Broadway musical Cabaret. Kosky reorganized the score to include numbers that Bizet jettisoned before the opera’s 1875 premiere. The dialogue has been replaced by a narrative seductively voiced by the actor Claude de Demo, which focuses on the psychological power struggle between Carmen and Don José.
Choreographer Otto Pichler dug into the blend of Broadway and Weimar cabaret with big show numbers that Bizet could never have imagined. Six hyper-energized dancers tore up the stage in tongue-in-cheek, often very camp routines that left one breathless. Their moves brought to mind Jonathan Miller’s dizzying 1986 production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado for English National Opera.
In a production short on symbolism, Kosky’s use of a rope that binds Carmen and Don José together was particularly effective. Carmen’s enormous black train in the final scene serves a similar purpose when Don José stands on it in an attempt to keep her from abandoning him for Escamillo.
Bianca Andrew’s Carmen channeled Louise Brooks and Liza Minnelli, with her gamine looks, arch asides, and knowing glances directed at the audience. Her singing was just as sophisticated and impressive whether beguiling a man, forecasting doom, or tempting fate in verbal combat with Abraham Bretón’s Don José. Bretón took a while to warm up, but when he did, his husky tenor blazed. It wasn’t all brawn, as he sang the “Flower Song” with the requisite ardor and finesse.
Kihwan Sim’s charisma and robust baritone made for an excellent Escamillo. There was glamor to spare when he entered in his gold-sequined traje de luces, or suit of lights. Nombulelo Yende was a timorous Michaëla, but her creamy, seamless soprano ached with emotion. The South African soprano joined the Oper Frankfurt ensemble in the 2024-25 season and is a clear audience favorite.
The chorus went all out with great singing, enthusiastically joining in the hijinks and kinetic motion. Conductor Jader Bignamini favored brisk tempos, rhythmic vitality, and dazzling colors, just what Kosky’s production demands.
The final opera was a revival of Anselm Weber’s 2015 production of Mieczysław Weinberg’s Die Passagierin. The opera is based on the autobiographical novel Pasazerka by Zofia Posmysz, a Polish resistance fighter in World War II who survived imprisonment at the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps. Weinberg (1919-1996) composed the opera in 1968, but it was first performed in a semi-staged version in Moscow in 2006.
The story unfolds on a transatlantic crossing to Brazil in the late 1950s, with flashbacks to Auschwitz circa 1943-44, when the killing machine was in full operation. Weber stages the opera in a ship’s hull, ingeniously designed by Katja Hass, on a set that rotates to reveal either a space for shipboard dances or the concentration camp barracks where the inmates are held. The prisoners are dehumanized by their Nazi overlords, who complain about the efforts involved in killing 20,000 people a day, but never lose their innate humanity.
Katharina Magiera’s Lisa was glamorous and brittle, with a clear, alto voice that iced over in both fear and hatred. She showed no guilt or remorse over either her actions at Auschwitz or for not telling her husband, Walter, about her past. The American tenor AJ Glueckert, a member of Oper Frankfurt since the 2016-17 season, was a distant, self-absorbed Walter, a man interested in his sexy wife until her disclosures threatened to destroy his career.
American soprano Amanda Majeski employed her immaculate soprano to probe Marta’s complex emotions in an outstanding performance underpinned by integrity both musical and dramatic. Baritone Mikołaj Trąbka brought authenticity to the idealistic Tadeusz, not only through the incandescent intensity of his performance, but also because he is Polish, as was his character.
Leo Hussain led a riveting, unflinching account of Weinberg’s score. It is music that, even at its most jaunty, from jazzy dances to the macabre waltz, expresses profound sorrow. After the performance, it was impossible to shake those emotions. Frankfurt still bears the marks of having been almost destroyed by bombing during World War II, and its sidewalks are studded with small brass plaques commemorating the victims of the Nazi regime.
