Sturmnacht

The opera is set in the present day on a holm. The apprentice painter Christian encounters Else, the pastor’s daughter in the vicarage. Else tells him about the failed marriage of her parents: her mother died after endless demoralising arguments with Else’s father without her parents ever having been reconciled. By chance, the father finds out that Else and Christian have arranged to meet at night. Else intends to light a lamp in the window of her room to show Christian the way from the tidal flats to the holm. It is a stormy night; Else leaves her room to take a closer look at the conditions on the holm. This gives her father the opportunity to extinguish the light at the window of her room. The next morning, Christian’s dead body is found washed up on the beach having been drowned in the approaching floods; Else immediately recognises that only her father could have extinguished the lamp and commits suicide.
Wolfgang-Andreas Schultz and his librettist Hanns-Josef Ortheil adapt the classical tale of Hero and Leander in their opera Sturmnacht and relocate it to the present day. The simultaneous unfolding of the scenes in which both the father and Else recall events in connection with the death of her mother is enabled through an inner chamber built on stage which allows scenes from the present and the remembered past to be performed simultaneously. The music by Schultz remains largely within the tonal romantic tradition, combining the style of folk songs with reminiscences of popular music such as pop or rock and roll originating from the period of the opera’s composition. The father’s uptight worlds of emotion and thought are expressed in narrow diatonic lines.