A multifaceted German composer, Hans Werner Henze (1926 - 2012) boasts a production that ranges from symphonic music to film music to opera.

The sixth work in his catalogue, Der junge Lord was composed in 1964 to a libretto by his friend the writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who was inspired by the fairy tale The Ape as Man by Wilhelm Hauff, a 19th-century German fable writer. Its debut at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin in 1965 under the direction of Christoph von Dohnányi caused such a sensation that the opera was soon staged in the major European theatres. In an imaginary German provincial town, the life of the inhabitants is turned upside down by the arrival of an English nobleman, the enigmatic Lord Edgar, with his unlikely entourage of bizarre characters. Among them is also his nephew, the young Lord Barrat, who attracts and worries the other protagonists of the opera with his strange ways. In order to keep up with the new arrivals, the inhabitants try to please the young Lord in every way, only to discover at the end that they have been deceived: in the guise of Lord Barrat there is in fact a trained monkey from a circus.

Although there are typical elements of the comic opera of the eighteenth-century tradition that give it an apparent lightness, Henze's work is nevertheless a bitter reflection on the hypocrisy of the right-thinking society and on the marginalization of the individual, themes translated into a writing that is at times corrosive and cutting even if inserted in the reassuring context of tonality.

New staging
First performance in Italy in the original language

Poster © Gianluigi Toccafondo

The performance of the 28th May will be be broadcast live on Rai Radio 3