Liliom

The fairground barker Liliom is the great attraction of carousel operator Mrs Muskat in the City Park in Budapest. He is young, good-looking and wonderfully masculine. Admittedly, he is also coarse, impetuous and known to the police – but this is what the carousel's female customers love about him, as does Mrs Muskat. The young servant girl Julie is also attracted by the suburban rogue – as he is by her. The result is that he causes both of them to lose their jobs. From then on, Liliom lives off Julie's aunt, beats the girl and gets her pregnant, and proudly refuses all well-intentioned offers of help. When a false friend talks him into committing robbery and murder with the aim of solving their financial problems, which ultimately goes horribly wrong, the rogue escapes responsibility for his actions by committing suicide and ends up in the courts of heavenly justice. There, the unrepentant man is offered one last chance to do something good so that he can dredge his soul of the deep mire in which it has landed …

In 1909, the Hungarian dramatist Ferenc Molnár brought the fate of Liliom, a good-for-nothing young man whom nothing in the world can help, to the theatre stage in Budapest, where the play was initially a disaster. It was only the first performance of the »Vorstadtlegende« in Vienna in the German version by Alfred Polgar that brought success for »Liliom« in 1913 and turned the rogue who thinks that Fate is giving him a hard time into Molnár's most popular figure nonetheless. Several film versions and the musical »Carousel« have adapted the action on stage, which moves between fairy tale and social drama, into other art forms. The Austrian composer Johanna Doderer, who has so far created stage works at the Vienna State Opera, Theater Erfurt and the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, has worked with Musical State Director Josef E Köpplinger to turn Molnár's international success into an opera for the first time and exclusively for the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz – with Daniel Prohaska (Liliom), Camille Schnoor (Julie) and Angelika Kirchschlager (Mrs Muskat) in the main roles!

Programmheft LILIOM Leseprobe

Besetzungszettel LILIOM 2018/2019