Lear

ABOUT THE OPERA

The adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear into opera has indeed been a challenge that few composers have undertaken, unlike other Shakespearean works like Gounod's Romeo and Juliet or Verdi's Otello, which became staples of the operatic repertoire. Perhaps this is because there wasn't a composer of Verdi's caliber who pursued the composition of an opera based on King Lear throughout his entire creative life.

However, in the last quarter of the 20th century, an opera based on this subject did emerge, gaining immense acclaim and being repeatedly performed on the world's most prestigious opera stages – it is Lear by the German composer and Berlin native Aribert Reimann (born 1936). Among his ten operas, there are adaptations of Kafka's The Castle and Strindberg's A Dream Play, but his most famous and renowned work is his fourth opera based on Shakespeare's play. It was commissioned by the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1978, and its initiator and first principal performer was the famous baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Reimann's operatic adaptation of Lear doesn't set Shakespeare's text word for word, but what is omitted is replaced by a suggestive, at times highly intense and harsh, at times very moving musical language unmistakably following in the footsteps of German expressionism.

The allegory of human folly, the illusion of self-importance, the danger of rejection, as well as acceptance of responsibility, or the decay of what seems to be a stable world, could hardly be more urgent than in Reimann's opera.