La Calisto

Conductor: Christina Pluhar
Stage director: Stefan Herheim

L’ Arpeggiata

The world lies in ruins, devastated by an inferno. Jupiter, the supreme god, wishes to supply the Earth with water again. He descends to Earth and, all of a sudden, falls in love with the nymph Callisto. Although she has dedicated herself to the goddess Diana’s cult of chastity, Jupiter is undeterred: taking Diana’s form, he seduces the nymph. Afterwards, when Callisto encounters the real Diana, she is met not with love, but with rejection and anger. Diana, for her part, has lost her heart to the young Endymion, which in turn arouses the jealousy of Pan, the god of shepherds. In the end, Jupiter’s wife Juno puts an end to all these passion-driven goings-on and attempted seductions, and turns her husband’s innocent beloved into a wild bear. Gods, nymphs and mythical creatures are thrown together in Francesco Cavalli’s opera La Calisto. All are under the spell of love and desire, power and violence, and so present a tragicomic portrayal of human passions.
The opera, first performed in Venice in 1651, questions not just the moral standards on which social order is based, but also the gender roles they demand. Does Callisto’s transformation into the constellation Ursa Major at the end of the opera represent a break with the divine order or a conquest? Artistic director Stefan Herheim stages this early Baroque opera in collaboration with the lutenist and conductor Christina Pluhar, one of the leading exponents of seventeenth-century music, as comic fairy-tale theatre.