The Princess of Trébizonde in the Theater Weimar, the 10th of June, 2022

My weekend opera trip to Germany began this time in Weimar with Jacques Offenbach’s opera buffa “The Princess of Trébizonde”. There are plenty of opera houses in Germany, so to stand out it is quite common that directors make rather outrageous versions of even the most classical operas.  Even this time the director Anna Weber had changed this less known opera by Offenbach rather drastically.  

But the simplified story of this version was the following (you can find the original story for example in the English Wikipedia, if you are interested): Somewhere in the nearish future the theatre of Weimar has been closed down due to cost savings. A travelling group is performing on the market in front of the theatre house with their wax cabinet. One of the performers, Zanetta, accidentally destroys the nose of their most famous wax figure – the princess of Trébizonde and she is forced to pretend to be the figure herself. The son (Raphaël) of a local mogul, Casimir, falls in love with Zanetta and he arranges that the group wins the theatre house in a lottery. First, the group does not know what to do with the theatre, but finally Casimir ends up buying the house and the collection of wax figures and established a tourist attraction called Waxworld Weimar, whose centre pieces are wax figures based on famous operas. Casimir is ready to move to his next project, but Raphaël opposes it, since he still loves Zanetta.  In the end the real princess of Trébizonde appears and returns the things to normal.  

The first act of the opera was performed on the marketplace in front of the opera house, which offered some opera even to some people, who had not paid the ticket. The next two acts were played inside the theatre (whose stage was really empty during the second act). The best part of the opera was the third act and the Waxworld Weimar. The opera wax figures were quite amusing, and it was fun to try to recognize them. I also liked the group of hunters who trotted to the stage in the casting scene of the opera. It contained just the correct amount of parody about the hunters in traditional leather shorts.

From the musical point of view, the evening was not superb. There was quite a lot of extra talking and that took room from the singing. The biggest impression on me was made by the tenor Taejun Sun. He had a fine voice and he was a good performer. Often Koreans are a bit stiff on the stage, but that could not be said about him.