About the work
"Die große Stille" ("The Great Silence") is a music-theatre project by Christopher Rüping, Omer Meir Wellber and Malte Ubenauf with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, premiered on 15 March 2026 at the Staatsoper Hamburg. It is not a self-contained new operatic composition but an evening drawing on works by Mozart – including rarely performed pieces such as the song "Das Veilchen". Director Christopher Rüping and General Music Director Omer Meir Wellber combine Mozart's music with a futuristic framing narrative.
Plot
The frame story imagines a distant future: a small group of people maintains a connection to Earth through the music of Mozart. Out of this constellation the evening unfolds a web of Mozart compositions. The second part centres on Mozart's early opera "Apollo et Hyacinthus" (K. 38), premiered in 1767 at the University of Salzburg. "Die große Stille" thus interweaves Mozart's musical legacy with a science-fiction-like narrative about memory, loss and what remains of humanity.
Cultural significance
"Die große Stille" represents a contemporary form of music theatre that does not preserve the operatic canon as a museum piece but recontextualises it: Mozart's music becomes the vehicle for an existential question projected into the future. The collaboration of Christopher Rüping – known for his spoken theatre – with the conductor Omer Meir Wellber at the Staatsoper Hamburg exemplifies the productive exchange between drama and opera. By including rarely performed Mozart works such as "Apollo et Hyacinthus", the evening also performs a kind of repertoire archaeology.