Around the Music Festival

The Wiener Staatsoper has announced that it will abandon its production of Aribert Reimann’s “Medea” scheduled for late January. The Wiener Staatsoper said that Nicole Chevalier, who was scheduled to play the title role, had to withdraw from the production “due to serious family reasons” and that a replacement could not be found.

Reimann’s “Medea” had its world premiere at the Vienna State Opera in 2010. The State Opera commissioned Reimann to compose the piece, which is based on the third part of the three-part poem “Medea” from the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer’s “Golden Fleece”. The libretto was written by Reimann himself, and the work is one of his masterpieces, combining modern sounds with classical musical composition.

The world premiere was directed by Marco Arturo Marelli, and that year it was awarded the “Best World Premiere of the Year” by the German opera magazine Opernwelt. This revival performance was scheduled to be held on January 21st, 24th, and 27th.

However, this work has only been performed at the Nissay Theater in Tokyo (2012) and the Komische Oper in Berlin (2017), other than the National Opera House. Chevalier, who was chosen for this performance, received high acclaim for singing the main character Medea in a performance at the Komische Oper, and is considered a leading performer.

According to the theater, there are currently only two singers in the world who can fill in for the performer, and although they had approached them about filling in for the role, they had other plans, so they had no choice but to abandon the performance. The Staatsoper will replace it with a performance of Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos”.

Photo：Komische Oper Berlin