Piramo e Tisbe

The story of Pyramus and Thisbe was made famous as a parody: In Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream it is performed at a wedding by a group of tradesmen (the mechanicals). Owing to their lack of talent as actors and their ill-advised ideas for staging the work, the tragic plot becomes a comedy. This was not at all the way that Johann Adolph Hasse wanted to go, and he took the ill-fated love of the young Babylonian couple that dies together completely seriously. In his version, even the third person in the story, Thisbe’s tyrannical father, dies at the end. In Piramo e Tisbe, Hasse chose to largely dispense with the Baroque form of the da-capo aria, instead developing a kind of through-composed musical drama. The work was first given in 1768 in a palace outside Vienna (it is not yet known which one), and was performed two years later in Laxenburg, south of the city, before sinking 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 curtain-up

(Source: https://www.theater-wien.at)