Lear
Oper in two pieces by Aribert Reimann
Libretto by Claus H. Henneberg after William Shakespeare
2 hours 45 minutes
Debut performance 1978 - Premiere on 22 November 2009
The King is tired. He wants to transfer governmental affairs to his daughters – and then just die in peace. Unfortunately he fuses the partitioning of his kingdom with the call to a public display of affection. Cordelia, the honestly loving daughter has no words in this competition and lags far behind her two successfully pretending sisters. Lear is deceived by the swindle, gets angry and disinherits the supposedly ungrateful Cordelia. But instead of retiring, the resigned monarch is expelled by his power-hungry daughters. In the company of a stalwart and a jester, he escapes to the heath and goes mad. The intrigues, which affect the kingdom, escalate to a bloody civil war. Only when Lear dies, holding the dead Cordelia in his arm, he realises what has happened and what he did.
The Berlin composer Aribert Reimann created with »Lear« one of the most important operas of the last century. Shakespeare's monumental tragedy about the senile King and the parallel plot – in the opera even simultaneously arranged – about the two sons of the Earl of Gloster, become in Reimann's opera a shocking portrayal of a rugged landscape of the soul. »Lear's« immediate dramatic force is due to an expressive sound, which evolves around the suffering subject, being the central theme of the opera. At the end, the brutality and the insanity of the society and its seemingly inescapable mechanisms are counterposed by a moving appeal to humanity: »Cry! Cry! Cry! You are people of stone!«