L'elisir d'amore

Michele Spotti is Music Director of the Opéra de Marseille and of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Marseille. From the 2026/27 season, he will also be Principal Guest Conductor of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. He studied violin and conducting in Milan as well as in Geneva and made his debut at the age of only twenty with "Le nozze di Figaro" in Orvieto. In 2016, he was assistant to Alberto Zedda for Rossini’s "Ermione" at the Opéra de Lyon. His recent engagements include "Rigoletto" at the Arena Opera Festival and at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, "Les Brigands" at the Opéra de Paris, as well as "L'heure espagnole" / "Gianni Schicchi" in Valencia. Debuts include, among others, "Norma" at the Maggio Fiorentino, "Simon Boccanegra" in Naples, "Die Zauberflöte" in Rome, "La fille du régiment" at the Vienna State Opera, "La bohème" at the Semperoper Dresden, "La traviata" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, as well as a program with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. In the 2025/26 season, he conducts, among others, Wagner’s "Das Rheingold" in Marseille, "Falstaff" at the Festival Verdi in Parma, "L’italiana in Algeri" in Geneva, as well as a concert with the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne and Beatrice Rana. He has worked with directors such as Robert Wilson, Damiano Michieletto, Barrie Kosky, Laurent Pelly, and Pier Luigi Pizzi. As a concert conductor, he appears, among others, with the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, the Orchestre national d’Île-de-France, and the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini. The French Ministry of Culture awarded him the title "Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres". With "L'elisir d'amore", Michele Spotti will be making his debut at the Zurich Opera House.

Julia Lwowski studied music theatre directing at the University of Music “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin. Since 2009, she has staged performative music theatre, opera, drama, and dance, among others at the Stuttgart State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Bavarian State Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, Bühnen Bern, Theater Regensburg, the German National Theatre Weimar, the Kassel State Theatre, HAU Berlin, the Sophiensæle, the Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris, and the Rote Fabrik Zurich. As a laboratory for contemporary, cross-genre music theatre, she founded the music theatre collective Hauen und Stechen in 2012 at the Berlin Galerina Steiner, which attracted attention with the performance series of the same name. The collective received basic funding from the city of Berlin for the years 2024 to 2027. As a production manager and interpreter, she worked from 2013 to 2026 at the Ruhrtriennale, the Salzburg Festival, and the Schwetzingen Festival, among others with the conductors Mariss Jansons, Teodor Currentzis, and René Jacobs, and curated the opera festival “Sound of the City” at Oper Wuppertal in the summer of 2022. She opened the 2020/21 season at Oper Halle with Verdi’s “La traviata”. In autumn 2021, she made her debut at the Stuttgart State Opera with Dessau’s “Die Verurteilung des Lukullus”, for which she was nominated for the theatre prize “Der Faust”. Other important stages of her work include “Nixon in China” at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, “The Tempest” at the Kassel State Theatre, “Norma. Eine Séance” at the German National Theatre Weimar, “M’Orpheo” at Theater Regensburg, “Tristan und Isolde oder Luft! Luft! Mir erstickt das Herz” with Theater HORA at the Rote Fabrik Zurich and the Sophiensæle Berlin, “Die Jungfrau von Orléans” at the Saarland State Theatre, as well as the world premiere of “Don’t You NOMI?” at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden / Linden 21. She made her Swiss debut in spring 2026 with “La forza del destino” at Bühnen Bern. In the 2026/27 season, Julia Lwowski will stage Gaetano Donizetti’s “L’elisir d’amore” at the Zurich Opera House.

The Argentina-born and New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg combines film, installation spaces, and sculpture in her work. At the center of her oeuvre lie questions of labor and value creation in a hyper-capitalist present. Drawing on traditions of cinema and sculpture, Rottenberg travels worldwide to locations where specific systems of production and trade become visible – for example, a pearl factory in China or a border town near Calexico. In the editing process, she combines this material with footage from sets built in her studio, thus linking seemingly disparate places and things into complex and subversive visual worlds. By intertwining fact and fiction, she makes the beauty and absurdity of our present tangible. Her video works are embedded in theatrical installations that incorporate objects from the parallel worlds of her films. A recent example is "Lampshares" (since 2023), a kind of circular micro-economy: functional sculptures are created from invasive vines and recycled plastic waste from New York. Rottenberg’s most recent feature film "REMOTE" (2022), realized with Mahyad Tousi, was commissioned by Artangel, the Louisiana Museum, and the Moderna Museet and premiered in 2022 at the Tate Modern and at the New York Film Festival. She studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and completed an MFA at Columbia University in 2004. In 2019, she received the Kurt Schwitters Prize, and in 2018 the James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Klaas-Jan de Groot is a Dutch conductor and choral director. Since the 2025/26 season, he has been Chorus Director of the Opernhaus Zürich. After studying in The Hague and Cardiff, he served from 2016 to 2022 as assistant to Chorus Director Ching-Lien Wu at the Dutch National Opera, where he prepared several productions and projects with the opera chorus. Since 2018, he has worked regularly with the Netherlands Radio Choir (Groot Omroepkoor). From 2018 to 2024, he served annually as assistant to Chorus Director Eberhard Friedrich at the Bayreuth Festival. He has conducted various concerts and performances with Opera Zuid as well as with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and the Essener Philharmoniker. From 2022 to 2025, he was Chorus Director of the Aalto-Theater in Essen. Since 2023, he has worked regularly with the NDR Vokalensemble in Hamburg. In 2024, he made his debut with the MDR-Rundfunkchor as well as with the Rundfunkchor Berlin. In recognition of his support for emerging talent, Klaas-Jan de Groot was awarded the prestigious Dutch Conducting Prize of the Anton Kersjes Fonds in 2021.

Elfried Roller is a native of Stuttgart. While studying electrical engineering, he worked part-time at a private theater in Karlsruhe. This was followed by professional training at the Stuttgart Opera House. He then moved to the Staatstheater Kassel, where he created lighting designs for directors such as Armin Petras, Volker Schmalöer, Schirin Khodadadian, and Hans Henning Paar. Since 2008, Elfried Roller has been employed at the Zurich Opera House. There he designed the lighting for productions such as “La finta giardiniera” directed by Tatjana Gürbaca, Donizetti’s “Roberto Devereux” by David Alden, as well as Sebastian Baumgarten’s productions of “Hamletmaschine,” “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” “Belshazzar,” “Turandot,” and “America.” In 2023, a guest engagement took him to the Deutsche Oper Berlin with Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena,” directed by David Alden.

Roman Reeger studied Historical Musicology and Law at the University of Hamburg. He gained his first theatre experience as an intern and assistant at the theatres in Oldenburg and Kiel, as well as at the Staatsoper and the Schaubühne in Berlin. In 2013, he joined the dramaturgy department of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. From 2020 to 2025, he was a senior dramaturg and member of the opera management team at Theater Basel. Guest engagements have taken him to the Baden-Baden Easter Festival and the Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre, among others. He has collaborated with directors such as Christoph Marthaler, Herbert Fritsch, Thom Luz, Benedikt von Peter, Philippe Quesne, Claus Guth, Andreas Kriegenburg, Anna Bergmann, Eva-Maria Höckmayr, and Jürgen Flimm, and has overseen world premieres of works by composers including Jörg Widmann, Oscar Strasnoy, Lucia Ronchetti, Manos Tsangaris, Beat Furrer, Hèctor Parra, and Herbert Grönemeyer. As a freelance author, he has contributed to specialist journals, exhibition catalogues, and CD booklets, regularly gives lectures, and has taught as a lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts. Since the 2025/26 season, he has been Chief Dramaturg at the Zurich Opera House.