{"id":17822,"date":"2026-01-09T18:32:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T23:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/?p=17822"},"modified":"2026-03-01T18:35:47","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T23:35:47","slug":"a-fairy-tale-opera-trades-the-moral-for-the-mysterious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/a-fairy-tale-opera-trades-the-moral-for-the-mysterious\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fairy Tale Opera Trades the Moral for the Mysterious"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

Matthias Pintscher\u2019s first opera in 20 years invites audiences to find their own meaning in a macabre 19th-century tale.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Jeffrey Arlo Brown<\/p>\n

The composer Matthias Pintscher was hiking in the Black Forest a few years ago, considering an offer to compose a new work for the Berlin State Opera, when the words to a German fairy tale came rushing back to him.<\/p>\n

When he was 5, Pintscher had listened obsessively to a story called \u201cThe Cold Heart\u201d (\u201cDas kalte Herz\u201d) on cassette. The tale is about a poor charcoal burner who trades his heart for a slab of stone. The haunting story seemed like the ideal subject for a new opera \u2014 Pintscher\u2019s first in over 20 years. That piece, also titled \u201cDas kalte Herz,\u201d premieres in Berlin on Sunday, then travels to the Op\u00e9ra-Comique in Paris on March 11.<\/p>\n

Pintscher, now 54, is the music director of the Kansas City Symphony, a frequent guest conductor with the world\u2019s leading orchestras and a composer of darkly mysterious and precisely imagined music. Born in Marl, Germany, he now lives in New York City and teaches composition at the Juilliard School.<\/p>\n

In an interview, Pintscher said he saw \u201cDas kalte Herz\u201d as a breakthrough work that shows the confidence to let the audience reach its own conclusions. In the kind of art he wants to make, Pintscher added, \u201cthere\u2019s always that element that something feels not completed by the artist, but it\u2019s passed over to the viewer, to the reader, to the listener.\u201d<\/p>\n

A man stands on a platform and holds a baton while directing an orchestra.
\nPintscher will conduct the premiere on Sunday at the Berlin State Opera.Credit…Bernd Uhlig
\nFor that to happen, Pintscher and his librettist, Daniel Arkadij Gerzenberg, had to adjust their source material. In the original fairy tale, written by Wilhelm Hauff in the early 19th century, Peter, the charcoal burner, longs to be wealthy and enters into a Faustian bargain with an evil forest spirit. After exchanging his heart for a piece of marble, he becomes a brutal miser, whipping his wife to death for giving a poor man some of his wine. The moral is that a person should accept his lot in life, no matter how lowly.<\/p>\n

Read the full story.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The New York Times Matthias Pintscher\u2019s first opera in 20 years invites audiences to find their own meaning in a macabre 19th-century tale. By Jeffrey Arlo Brown The composer Matthias Pintscher was hiking in the Black Forest a few years ago, considering an offer to compose a new work for the Berlin State Opera, … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4256,3613,7129,3927,3705,4195],"class_list":["post-17822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-composer","tag-conductor","tag-matthias-pintscher","tag-new-music","tag-opera","tag-profile"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17823,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17822\/revisions\/17823"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/1359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.opus3artists.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}