The program of the 87th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival continues: in the Main Hall, “Der junge Lord” by Hans Werner Henze is scheduled.

On the podium, leading the Orchestra, the Chorus of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Children's Chorus of the Accademia del Maggio, Maestro Markus Stenz.

The show is directed by Daniele Menghini.

First performance in the Maggio seasons and first performance in Italy in the original language

New staging

The performance of May 28th will be broadcast live on Rai Radio 3

The opera poster is by Gianluigi Toccafondo

Firenze, May 14th 2025 – After the intense success of the inaugural Salome, the opera program of the 87th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Festival continues with Der junge Lord, an opera in two acts by Hans Werner Henze with a libretto by the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann. The opera and libretto are inspired by the fairy tale The Ape as Man by Wilhelm Hauff, a 19th-century German fable writer.

The opera is performed for the first time in the Maggio seasons and for the first time in Italy in the original language: the first performance is on Sunday, May 25th at 5 pm, with repeats on Wednesday 28th (8 pm) and Saturday 31st (3:30 pm).

On the podium of the Sala Grande del Maggio is maestro Markus Stenz, who made his debut at the Teatro in the autumn of 1990 in a symphonic concert where he conducted a composition by Henze, the Barcarolle. The direction of the show is entrusted to Daniele Menghini, making his absolute debut on the Florentine stage. The maestro of the Coro del Maggio is Lorenzo Fratini; the maestro of the children's choir of the Accademia del Maggio is Sara Matteucci.

In this new production the scenes are by Davide Signorini, the costumes by Nika Campisi and the lights by Gianni Bertoli.

Also starring are the dancers of the KOMOCO Company who will dance on the basis of the choreography curated by Sofia Nappi; the assistant to the choreography is Adriano Popolo Rubbio.

The cast includes the actor Giovanni Franzoni as Sir Edgar and – in the large singing company – Levent Bakirci as Sein Sekretär (his secretary; Matteo Falcier as Lord Barrat; Marilyn Santoro as Luise; Caterina Dellaere as Begonia; Andreas Mattersberger as Der Bürgermeister and Marina Comparato as Baronin Grünwiesel. Marilyn Santoro as Luise and Antonio Mandrillo as Wilhelm.

A large number of talents and former talents of the Maggio Academy complete the singing company: Yurii Strakhov is Oberjustizrat Hasentreffer; Gonzalo Godoy Sepúlveda is Ökonomierat Scharf; Professor von Mucker is played by Lorenzo Martelli; Aloisia de Nardis plays Frau Oberjustizrat Hasentreffer, Nikoletta Hertsak plays Ida; Letizia Bertoldi is Ein Kammermädchen; Ioanna Kykna is Frau von Hufnagel and Davide Sodini is Ein Lichtputzer.

Superintendent Carlo Fuortes said: “I am very happy to put this opera on the bill; I had been thinking of doing it for many years, in other theaters, and at the first edition of the Maggio Festival, which I curated, I wanted to include it right away. It is a pearl, a truly extraordinary piece of musical theater never done in Italy with wonderful music and a very topical libretto. The poet and librettist Ingeborg Bachmann, together with the composer Henze, deal with themes of diversity, of difficulty of understanding within society with a phenomenal stylistic figure and it is still very topical today. The music then tells everything without ever being didactic: it also has true and profound messages. This is why the opera is beautiful, and it is also very complex: 15 singers, our fantastic Choir, a Children's Choir, a large vocal cast, actors, dancers, circus performers on stage and who “move” between very challenging scenes imagined by the director and built in our laboratories; in the pit a wonderful Orchestra like ours that has never performed this opera. For the Theater it is a great commitment and it is right that the Maggio should take this ‘risk’: our theater must continue its noble tradition. Also for next year, we have announced a new production in fact we will inaugurate the next festival with The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams and during the 2026 season we have also announced a new commission Romanzo Criminale: the Maggio must continue to have attention for the new”.

Speaking about this new production, maestro Markus Stenz underlined how the opera can already be defined as a classic: “I think that Der junge Lord can already be defined as a classic and not a contemporary composition. It is also a delightful example of comic opera, created with the precious contribution of the librettist Ingeborg Bachmann; I also love that this opera is truly pure theatre and that it goes decidedly beyond our expectations of the modern digital world: it re-establishes the concept of ‘making theatre for theatre’s sake’. All the special effects are natural and created by the people themselves and the stage is full: there are actors, the choir, the young people of the Coro delle voci bianche and the extras. This opera is the height of fun, in short, but at the same time it is also impressively profound. Working with Daniele Menghini was very stimulating, I really appreciate his vision of the opera, he is capable of telling this story exactly for what it wants to convey but he was also able to do it with so much creativity: this allows you to understand the opera without the need to know it first and the story simply unfolds before the eyes of the audience”.

Daniele Menghini echoed the words of maestro Stenz: "It is a joy and an honor to be able to debut in this edition of the Maggio Festival and it is even more so to be able to do so with an opera like Der junge Lord, which confirms the pioneering spirit of a Festival that has always tried to find new titles outside the classic schemes of the repertoire. On this occasion it is done with the wonderful opera that Henze composed together with the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, starting from a German short story from the 19th century thanks to which he composed a true masterpiece with decidedly irreverent traits that reveals all our hypocrisies and all our neuroses that we all often struggle to recognize and admit. It is a choral, unpredictable and at times incorrect opera that - if on the one hand it looks to tradition - on the other it deforms it with that grotesque cynicism that only the Germans know how to convey. The unexpected ending indirectly makes us ask: what are we willing to sacrifice of our highly civilized humanity to appear less bestial and brutal than we really are?”