Germany Matthias Pintscher, Das kalte Herz: Soloists, Staatskapelle Berlin / Matthias Pintscher (conductor), Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin, 11.1.2026. (AB)
Matthias Pintscher’s Das kalte Herz, which received its world premiere at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, takes its title from one of the best-known German Kunstmärchen (or ‘artistic fairy tales’) of the early nineteenth century. Wilhelm Hauff’s tale of 1827 is a concise moral parable, built on a clear narrative trajectory: social dissatisfaction leads to moral corruption; emotional desiccation follows material success; and redemption becomes possible only through the recovery of humanity. That this material should invite operatic treatment — and indeed has done so in the past — is self-evident. Rather less self-evident, and ultimately curious, is the extent to which Pintscher and his librettist Daniel Arkadij Gerzenberg chose to disengage from it.
Apart from the title and the protagonist’s name, little remains of Hauff’s story. The folkloric Black Forest, the figures of the Holländer-Michel — who replaces Peter’s heart with one of stone — and the Glass Man — who enables its recovery — and the ultimately restorative fairy-tale logic are all discarded. In their place stands a symbolic, mythologically overburdened scenario. Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, appears alongside Azaël, a fallen angel who speaks rather than sings. Most radically, Peter’s heart is removed by his own mother — and it is never returned. What was once a social parable becomes a diffuse psychological system in which guilt, trauma, and emotional paralysis circulate without resolution.
This shift also extends to Peter’s relationship with Clara. In Hauff’s tale she is called Lisbeth and is Peter’s wife; in Gerzenberg’s libretto she becomes his girlfriend. The change is not merely semantic. Clara and Peter inhabit different emotional and linguistic worlds: they speak past one another, unable to articulate either intimacy or understanding. Their encounters are marked by abstraction and mutual incomprehension, reinforcing the opera’s broader preoccupation with failed communication rather than moral choice.
Throughout, the text remains problematically abstract. Its language circles insistently around concepts such as pain, fate, transformation, and the impossibility of being understood, but rarely allows these ideas to crystallise into dramatic action. The opera unfolds in twelve tableaus that succeed one another without generating a sense of narrative development. A quotation from Wagner’s Lohengrin, inserted without irony or contextual necessity, exemplifies the problem: the gesture may be intended to evoke symbolic depth but instead exposes the libretto’s textual thinness overall.
James Darrah Black’s staging and Adam Rigg’s set design do little to counteract this dramaturgical stasis. For much of the evening, the action unfolds before a stylised forest projected onto a low, flat wall that deliberately signals its own artificiality. Suspended above the stage hang numerous wolf carcasses on meat hooks — images heavy with implication yet curiously resistant to interpretation.
Only with the appearance of Anubis, roughly three quarters of the way into the opera’s uninterrupted 110 minutes, does the stage undergo a decisive transformation. The forest projection wall tilts backwards, opening onto a stage bathed in warm, glowing red. Television screens are wheeled on, displaying a mouth silently forming words. The image is striking, but once again its semantic function remains opaque: whether it adds meaning, and what that meaning might be, is left unresolved.
Musically, Pintscher’s score reveals a composer of great technical command and highly refined orchestral imagination. Conducting the always excellent Staatskapelle himself, he draws an extensive range of colours and textures from the orchestra: creaking, scratching and rustling sounds, metallic outbursts, and finely layered microtonal fields. The sound world is painted with a broad brush, often dominated by warm, dark, myth-evoking colours. Certain moments stand out — the extended bass-clarinet monologue accompanying Peter’s awakening after the heart operation, or the radiant woodwind writing associated with Clara.
Stylistic references are clearly audible. Dark, expansive string passages and the sensitive deployment of low woodwind and brass recall Wagner, while the wide, bright, hieratic sonorities surrounding Anubis unmistakably evoke Messiaen. These allusions undoubtedly generate a powerful atmosphere and demonstrate Pintscher’s mastery of texture and orchestration. Yet they rarely acquire true dramaturgical necessity.
What lends the evening its greatest artistic credibility are the performances. Samuel Hasselhorn brings remarkable intensity and vocal intelligence to the role of Peter, shaping a part that oscillates between intimate inwardness and exhausted declamation. Sophia Burgos, as Clara, offers moments of striking vocal clarity and focus, even if the role itself remains emblematic rather than fully human. Rosie Aldridge lends Anubis a powerful, sharply contoured presence, while Katarina Bradić’s mother is vocally dark and threatening. In the opera’s only spoken role, Sunnyi Melles’s Azaël introduces a welcome degree of articulation and, at times, dry wit.
In the end, Das kalte Herz emerges as an opera awkwardly caught between ambition and material. Pintscher’s score shows great sensitivity towards voices, and the singers commit themselves fully to the work. Yet the decision to abandon Hauff’s narrative logic without replacing it with an equally compelling dramatic structure leaves the opera emotionally distant. The heart at its centre may be made of stone — but it is the surrounding dramaturgy that ultimately remains curiously cold.
Andreas Bücker
Featured Image: Samuel Hasselhorn (Peter) and Rosie Aldridge (Anubis) © Bernd Uhlig
Production:
Director – James Darrah Black
Staging – Adam Rigg
Costumes – Molly Irelan
Lighting – Yi Zhao
Video – Hana S. Kim
Co-director – Anderson Nunnelley
Dramaturgy – Olaf A. Schmitt
Cast:
Peter – Samuel Hasselhorn
Mutter – Katarina Bradić
Anubis – Rosie Aldridge
Clara – Sophia Burgos
Azaël – Sunnyi Melles
Old Women – Adriane Queiroz
Child – Otto Glass