About the work
No work of Puccini’s is more focused on a period of upheaval and the quest for new social models than his 3-act opera IL TRITTICO, which premiered in 1918. Since 1900 Puccini had been toying and experimenting with a new approach to the subject: combining three 1-act operas into a single whole, in which fragmentation rather than a single integral unit is key. Here he amalgamates three distinct “inks”, a trio of different colours and temperatures, which themselves capture the essence of early-20th-century Italian opera. We have IL TABARRO (The Coat), which sketches a sombre and tragic menage-à-trois in the Parisian barge-traffic milieu. The protagonists move in cramped and parochial circles, where dreams and yearnings are repressed and not talked about. Clashes erupt, emotional scars are laid bare and the solution lies only in destruction, viz. a brutal murder motivated by jealousy. The second opera in the series, SUOR ANGELICA, is one of a kind in the history of opera, having a cast made up entirely of women. The theme is again love and death and the options open to the characters. Angelica, a nun, believes suicide to be the last avenue open to her in her attempt to escape an existence controlled and determined by others. Finally GIANNI SCHICCHI, a wickedly humorous grotesque in the commedia dell’arte vein, centres on individuals as gamblers and fraudulent materialists.


About the production
The young, award-winning director Pınar Karabulut is known to Deutsche Oper Berlin audiences for her spectacular staging of Turnage’s modern Oedipus opera, GREEK, on the parking deck of the opera house. Karabulut was also invited to present a piece that she had directed at the Münchener Kammerspiele. With IL TRITTICO she now has a work in the main auditorium of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, staging three separate operas as theatre of the world, made up of different colours and temperatures on a rotating stage.