About the work
Der Sandmann (The Sandman) is a cross-disciplinary opera — often described as a rock opera — by the British singer-songwriter Anna Calvi and the director Robert Wilson, after E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 story of the same name. The production premiered in 2017 at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus: music, arrangements and lyrics are by Anna Calvi, additional music and arrangements by Jherek Bischoff, with concept, book and design of the original production by Robert Wilson and the text version by Janine Ortiz. Wilson translates Hoffmann's Romantic tale of terror into his unmistakable visual language of stylised movement, sharply sculpted light and dreamlike artifice, while Calvi's songs move between indie rock, vaudeville and hymn-like intensity. The work fuses drama, song, dance and live band into a total artwork on the border between opera, musical and theatre.
Plot
As a child, Nathanael links his father's death in a nocturnal explosion with the terrifying figure of the Sandman he has been told about: one who throws sand into the eyes of children who will not sleep until they fall out, bloody. As a young man the trauma still pursues him; in the uncanny barometer-seller Coppola he recognises the diabolical lawyer Coppelius, whom he believes to be the Sandman of his childhood. Through a spyglass he falls in love with Olimpia, the seemingly perfect daughter of Professor Spalanzani — who turns out to be a mechanical doll, an automaton. The realisation drives Nathanael into madness; no longer able to tell reality from delusion, he finally hurls himself to his death from a tower.
Cultural significance
Hoffmann's Sandman is regarded as a key text of dark Romanticism and one of the most influential tales of the uncanny — not least because Sigmund Freud took it as the starting point of his famous 1919 essay "The Uncanny." Its motifs of the lifelike doll and the threatened eyes became archetypes of automaton and doppelgänger literature. Robert Wilson and Anna Calvi's stage version carries the material into the present of music theatre, joining the psychological depth of the source with the sensuous immediacy of pop. The Bielefeld staging took up the original concept and developed it further as a cross-disciplinary production.