"Pyramus and Thisbe"

The story of Pyramus and Thisbe has become famous as a parody: In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, it is performed by a troupe of craftsmen at a wedding, but the tragic plot turns into a comedy due to a lack of acting talent and questionable directorial decisions. Johann Adolph Hasse had no such intentions and took the unfortunate love of the young Babylonian couple, who go to their deaths together, completely seriously. In his version, even the third character in the story, Thisbe's despotic father, dies at the end. Hasse largely eschewed the baroque form of the da capo aria in Pyramus and Thisbe and instead developed a kind of through-composed music drama. The work premiered in 1768 in a (yet to be identified) palace outside Vienna, was performed two years later in Laxenburg, and then fell into obscurity for 250 years. Now it returns to the Danube.

Concert performance in Italian with German surtitles
Introduction to the work 30 minutes before the performance begins