Description:

Riders to the Sea by Ralph Vaughan Williams
Le pauvre matelot by Darius Milhaud
Savitri by Gustav Holst

Joachim Schamberger, director

The Bienen School welcomes internationally recognized stage director and video designer Joachim Schamberger as director of opera and artist in residence. Schamberger has staged productions throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia and is frequently invited to teach at music festivals and conservatories around the world. A graduate of the Musikhochschule in Würzberg and the San Francisco Opera’s Merola Opera Program, he also studied digital film production and 3-D animation at the New York Film Academy.

Schamberger’s first Northwestern University Opera Theater production is a triple bill of one-act operas premiered in the 1920s and ‘30s, all concerning the subject of death. Based on the play by John Millington Synge, Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea tells the story of the last surviving son of an Irish family cursed with losing its men at sea. In Milhaud’s Le pauvre matelot, a sailor returns home after 15 years away, posing as a stranger to test his wife’s fidelity. In Holst’s parable Savitri, Death arrives to claim the title character’s husband. Join us for a thought-provoking exploration of mortality’s great mystery, across cultures and settings.