PorosNouvelle production

A comeback after 15 years! The grand seigneur of realistic musical theatre is back – and he is fulfilling a long-held dream: Harry Kupfer, who made theatre history here in the Behrenstrasse, presents a fundamental conflict of European modernity with Georg Friedrich Handel’s masterful Baroque opera Poro.

India in the early eighteenth century: two worlds collide! Commissioned by the English crown, army officer Alexander is on a long exploratory mission towards the subcontinent – as the vanguard of British colonisation, he wants to vanquish the Indian king Poro. With the appearance of Mahamaya, a beautiful Indian queen desired by all men, the encounter between two completely different cultures develops into a battle that can only be won by whoever is as adept at war as in the arts of deceit and seduction. It is ultimately Poro’s courage that turns the tide, when love and mutual respect win utopian victories.

The template for Handel's work, which premièred in 1731, was written by the most famous librettist in opera history: Pietro Metastasio. In the early seventeenth century, no fewer than six different composers tackled this work, which tells of an episode in the India campaign of the ancient conqueror Alexander the Great. Handel's’ interpretation of the material develops the conflict within a chamber piece whose stirring and emotionally touching music features great theatrical passion and whose every note is imbued with an awareness of the human condition.