Orlando

Imagine being immortal and witnessing four centuries of history firsthand—first as a man, then as a woman...

A favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, the young English nobleman Orlando is showered with honours and estates—and henceforth, ceases to age. After an unresolved love affair with the beautiful Russian Sasha, Orlando withdraws from society, determined to become a poet. Disappointed once again, he then takes up a diplomatic post in a distant conflict zone. There, after a trance-like sleep lasting a week, Orlando awakens as a woman. With this change, she discovers that she’s lost all her property ownership rights in England. In search of freedom, Orlando journeys through centuries of patriarchal rule, witnessing Baroque decadence, Victorian morality, countless wars, and the rise of the digital age. Orlando’s own non-binary child embodies the fluidity of identity, challenging every notion of duality. As a poet, Orlando writes against simplification and populism, and as a time traveller, Orlando continuously reimagines the present.

At once visionary, critical, and ironic, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) was dedicated to her lover, Vita Sackville-West. With the 2019 opera Orlando, Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth extends this fictional biography into the present, becoming a time traveller herself as she embarks on a musical journey that stretches from madrigal to electronic music. Director Ewelina Marciniak brings this kaleidoscopic work—exploring the fluidity of time, style, and gender roles—to the German stage for the first time, as a hybrid grand opéra that blends fashion, media, space, and music.