The Wise Woman

If only he had believed his wise daughter! This is what the peasant realizes too late after giving his King a golden mortar as a present and being incarcerated for theft because the pestle is missing. But the King summons the peasant’s daughter, is defeated by her wisdom which he puts to the test by asking her three riddles, and eventually marries her. But when she draws the King’s attention to another of his foolish judgements, she is ordered to leave the court, taking only a chest with things that are dearest to her. She complies and prepares a last dinner. When the King wakes up the next morning from a sleeping-draught-induced sleep, he finds himself next to her under a tree, sitting in the chest …

‘Who has the power, has the right, and who has the right, perverts the course of justice, for violence reigns everywhere!’ Upon hearing such sentences, many a member of the audience may have held his/her breath when Carl Orff’s opera, based on fairytale motifs of, among others, the Brothers Grimm, was performed for the first time in Frankfurt in 1943. In this cheerful fairytale opera, Orff succeeded in artistically ‘squaring the circle’: He created a profound, yet extremely entertaining piece of world theatre which voices subversive truths in the innocuous guise of satirical play. To date, Die Kluge has been one of the most frequently performed stage works by Orff.