As part of a semester cooperation project with the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music under the direction of Prof. Claus Unzen & Prof. Sven Holm, excerpts from the operetta “Die Fledermaus” by Johann Strauss were realized on the “Studiobühne der HfM” and in the “Altes Kino Delphi” theatre in Berlin Weissensee.

In teamwork, students of directing and stage design have intensively dealt with this fascinating material and staged scenes from the three acts of “Die Fledermaus”.

When “Die Fledermaus” was first performed in Vienna in 1874, people had little to laugh about: the stock market crash of 1873 led Viennese society to a permanent crisis never seen before. Contemporary voices spoke of a “dispiriting force of depression” and of a “condition that bore all the hallmarks of a chronic, creeping fever: gradual debilitation, slow bleeding to death.” The perfect time for amusement and repression, for an operetta that evokes the decadence and downfall of a society. The work depicts a world that lives, that drinks, that dances … inwardly moral decline, abyss … outwardly the lie, the illusion, the deception to make life bearable.