O, nuit d'amour ... ! An evening with Veselina Kasarova and Jan Josef Liefers

The claim was in the best literary taste: »By making a record of the intoxicating existence that is Paris, some of the fever particular to it will be brought to life.« What the Goncourt brothers had in mind in the 1850s was nothing less then to compile a »powerful vivarium« of their epoch.

It was up to a foreigner, a Jew from Cologne who went on to become the most popular composer of the Second Empire, to put all this down in music and give sound to the unbridled intoxication of the frivolity of Napoleonic society. This foreigner was of course Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880). He was blessed with an unbelievable wealth of melodic ideas – and at the same time, a satirical eye for the presumptuousness, frivolities and longings of Parisians.

O, nuit d’amour …! combines sketches by Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules (1830-1870) de Goncourt about drunken mistresses, good society (»an assembly of malicious gossip«) and cats shot in cold-blood, with the excitable, eroticised and swirling music of Jacques Offenbach. Both the writers and the composer were spiteful – but equally they were affectionate chroniclers of their crazy era.

Vesselina Kasarova is of one of the exceptional stars in the operatic heaven: her vocal sovereignty and the engaging darkness of her timbre makes her one of the most fascinating singers of our time. Her interpretation of Mozart’s female characters, of Belcanto roles, and of the French school are legendary. The fact that she is also an irresistible diva of Offenbach turns her into an event.

Jan Josef Liefers is one of the most versatile actors of his generation. Able to play a wide range of stage characters he is also well-known to a wider public through his film and television roles, particularly as the sharp-tongued forensic investigator Karl-Ludwig Boerne from the Münster series of Tatort – a man whose delightful sarcasm is not incomparable with the pointed intonation of the Goncourts.