Oh, how moving it is when productions extend their lifespan for so long, enter the repertoire, experience successive revivals, and continue to touch audiences many years after their premiere! I’m talking about works that prove in practice either that, at their first staging, they were so ahead of their time that they retain their freshness intact while aesthetics change with the years and eras, or that their interpretation of the work was so successful and interesting that it loses nothing of its initial insight or surprise, even though the audience – or even the creators – now belong to an entirely different generation.
Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” his only “regular” opera, was first staged at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden under Sasha Waltz’s direction exactly twenty years ago (February 19, 2005), before its most recent revival in the same venue in the autumn of 2025: a huge span of time for a production that is – or aspires to be – considered “avant-garde.” Naturally, the production has been performed repeatedly over the years due to its great success.
It is, however, difficult to imagine the surprise of the audience at that first premiere, seeing the captivating opening scene with the aquarium where the dancers dive: judging by how we viewed the spectacle twenty years later, I wonder how much the curtain’s rise must have taken them by surprise back in that distant 2005. This is precisely where the patina of time bestows the glory of a classic upon what was once avant-garde.
It is very common for theatre directors, beyond their colleagues specializing in opera, to be enlisted to offer their unique perspective on a lyrical work. This happens less frequently with choreographers. For “Dido and Aeneas,” Sasha Waltz arrived at the exact same solution that Pina Bausch had adopted exactly thirty years earlier (1975) for Christoph Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” – it’s strange how many “round” time periods we encounter in this text: alongside the cast of lyrical artists performing the roles, she added another, that of the dancers. Beyond Pina’s inevitable and undeniable influence on almost all choreographers who followed the groundbreaking impact she made on contemporary dance, I don’t know if there’s another solution: apart from the difficulty for lyrical artists to execute such choreographies, the body postures required vocally are often radically different from those dance demands at the same moment. The two arts develop in parallel on stage, each with its practitioners: Pina’s boldness showed the way.
Sasha Waltz did not merely confine herself to the choreographic aspect, “dressing” the opera with an interpretation belonging to a different art form: she meticulously studied both the work itself and its historical background. I found the scene where Aeneas carried a child on his shoulders to be inspired and moving, a direct reference to how, escaping burning Troy, he carried his elderly father Anchises on his shoulders – an act that earned him the gods’ favor for the rest of his journey and the fulfillment of his personal destiny, as described in Virgil’s epic.
The cast was of the caliber one expects from a Berlin opera house, the capital of a country that has opera houses even in medium or small-sized cities. Under the musical direction of Christopher Moulds, an award-winning conductor specializing in Baroque opera, the orchestra delivered a fluid, delightful performance. The delightful Dido was Polish mezzo-soprano Natalia Skrycka, based in Germany, a regular at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, and also a member of the team that performed the Ring Cycle a year earlier (in 2024) at the Bayreuth Festival. Aeneas was Hungarian baritone Gyula Orendt, another favorite of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, who is currently performing Don Giovanni there – robust and imposing. Belinda was our own – and beloved – Aphrodite Patoulidou, who has performed the role in previous revivals of the production. Long based in Berlin and a hard worker, Patoulidou continues to thrill me just as she did the first time I saw her in Udo Zimmermann’s “The White Rose” at the Greek National Opera. In the seven years since then, she continues to evolve and establish herself internationally through hard work and attention to detail.
There are other touching details one can mention about a production of such longevity: some who started as children in the first cast and who now perform adult roles, but also children of participants in the original production who now, in turn, take to the stage for the children’s roles. This is what happens when an artistic work achieves the status of a classic: many small miracles occur around it.
