Matthias Pintscher’s new opera 'Das kalte Herz' premieres in Berlin

Matthias Pintscher’s new opera, Das kalte Herz, premieres in Berlin on Sunday; it is his first opera in more than 20 years and will travel to the Opéra-Comique in Paris on March 11. The production is directed by James Darrah Black with stage design by Adam Rigg, and Pintscher will conduct the premiere at the Berlin State Opera.

Pintscher said the idea returned to him while hiking in the Black Forest and that he had listened as a child to Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tale “The Cold Heart,” about a charcoal burner who trades his heart for stone. His librettist, Daniel Arkadij Gerzenberg, transformed Hauff’s clear moral — that a person should accept his lowly lot after the protagonist becomes a brutal miser — into a series of dreamlike tableaux that emphasize the central character’s helplessness.

Gerzenberg has said that he was groomed and sexually abused as a teenager by a trusted authority figure and lover of culture, a violation he described in a recent memoir and one that shaped his approach to the libretto. In Gerzenberg’s version, the character of Peter is traumatized — though the reason is never made explicit — and willing to give up his heart.

“The opera is definitely about methods of manipulation,” Gerzenberg said. Pintscher’s score foregrounds ambiguous, hard-to-identify sounds — including percussionists rubbing plastic cups against a thunder sheet — so that natural and human noises blur, while traditional operatic singing provides contrast.

Key Topics

Culture, Matthias Pintscher, Das Kalte Herz, Berlin State Opera, Opéra-comique, Daniel Arkadij Gerzenberg