Elisabeth Tudor

Mattias Braun who provided the libretto for Wolfgang Fortner’s opera Elisabeth Tudor commissioned by the Deutsche Oper Berlin presents compelling crowd scenes and an intense focus on the vacillation, emotional unpredictability and weaknesses of both queens in his interpretation of this well-known material, giving a simultaneously political and yet human and personal touch to the action. The two female figures are depicted as individual cogs in a mechanized system of political intrigue and merciless reason of state, both acting with cool calculation and yet not free in their decisions.
Fortner‘s only score to be based on a twelve-tone row exploits a wide variety of musical and dramatic representational forms. Orchestral interludes provide a structure for the sequence of scenes and individual orchestral groups are placed at different positions on the main and side stages. The percussion section heightens the dramaturgy, illustrating threatening and sombre moments with sound effects. Old English dances and instrumental pieces are quoted and simultaneously harmonically and rhythmically modulated, permitting the psychological motivation of the protagonists to emerge clearly from the purely historical atmospheric background.