Abstract
For 35 years, singer Liliana Nikiteanu has been a defining presence at the Zurich Opera House. Her memories and dreams become the starting point for a surreal exploration of life, opera and the passage of time.
"Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding" (“Time is a strange thing”), sings the Marschallin in "Der Rosenkavalier", “sometimes I hear it flowing.” Together with Liliana Nikiteanu, composer, director and multimedia artist Simon Steen-Andersen follows the sound of time on a journey that leads to deeply hidden corners of the opera house. Boundaries blur and different times flow into one another. The roles of a long career are revived and transformed through the veil of memory. Echoes from premieres of the previous season on the main stage – Strauss’s "Der Rosenkavalier", Verdi’s "La forza del destino", Marschner’s "Der Vampyr" and other operas – intertwine with the familiar formats of the Bernhard Theater to create a fever dream in which fiction and reality merge. A fantastical portrait of a unique artist and of two stages that could hardly be more different.
