La Damnation de Faust

Hector Berlioz's monumental hellish drama inspired by Goethe's Faust I combines orchestral power, demonic choirs, and heavenly melodies into an unparalleled symphonic-dramatic hybrid form. Director Lorenzo Fioroni – last seen at the Oper Graz with Britten's War Requiem – along with Johannes Braun conducting the Graz Philharmonic, brings Berlioz's ultimate Faust apocalypse to the stage of the Oper Graz in a spatial installation by the multiple award-winning set designer Sebastian Hannak.

In his masterpiece from 1846, the French sound magician Berlioz slices Goethe's myth into glaringly bright individual visions and creates with his boundless artistic tragedy a romantic counter-design to the classical reason-nature dualism of Goethe's original.
For director Lorenzo Fioroni, La Damnation de Faust becomes a game of insight: The longing for simplicity, for clear orientation is met by the present with overwhelming complexity and demands. The planned production understands Berlioz's idiosyncratic work as an invitation to a sensual thought experiment, in which the mythical Faust material is newly examined and becomes a mirror of a world gone awry.

Légende dramatique in four parts (1846/1893)
Text by the composer and Almire Gandonnière after “Faust I" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the translation by Gérard de Nerval

In French with German surtitles

Public Accessibility: Tram 1, 7 I Stop: Kaiser-Josef Platz/Oper

Tickets and further information