Sarah Brady

A count has designs on his personal valet's fiancée and is determined to stop their wedding taking place. Meanwhile, the countess tries to regain her husband's love by any means necessary. Mozart's great comic opera is a tale of intrigue, misunderstanding and forgiveness. Director Lydia Steier teases out the touching melancholy of the characters with the mixture of opulence and black humour. Oper! magazine’s ‘Opera house of the year’ in 2020, Staatsoper Hannover is on an artistic high and happy to share this production worldwide via OperaVision.

In Handel's oratorio Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (1707), the desire to live is at odds with the realisation of one's own mortality. In his early masterpiece, the composer was able to open up clear emotional spaces to the simultaneity of the incompatible. What does it mean to be alive - and what does it mean to demand to be fulfilled with this life? And who am I when the mirror only gazes at me in silence? In Handel's music the questions begin to float.