About the Production
Luisa, the daughter of the veteran Miller, is in love with a young hunter who has come to her village with the arrival of the new feudal lord.
But Wurm, the castle steward, is also in love with Luisa. He reveals the true identity of the supposed huntsman to her father: It is Rodolfo, the feudal lord's son, which makes a marriage with Luisa impossible for reasons of status. Rodolfo wants to fight for his love, but he and Luisa fall into the trap of the intriguing and corrupt court society.
Luisa
Miller
Storyline
A working day at the company where Luisa and her father are employed. It's Luisa's birthday. They celebrate Luisa and her love for Carlo. Her father is suspicious of her lover, but he doesn't want to oppose Luisa's choice of heart.
His suspicions are confirmed by Wurm, secretary to the powerful Count von Walter and Luisa's rejected suitor: Carlo is in fact Rodolfo, the Count's son. Miller knows that a marriage between the two lovers is therefore out of the question.
Federica is given a festive reception at Count von Walter's castle: The young widow was brought up together with Rodolfo and has now attained power and wealth. Walter has promised her his son's hand in marriage. But Rodolfo confesses to Federica that he loves someone else. She is not prepared to give him up.
Miller confronts Rodolfo. Rodolfo vows to enforce his marriage to Luisa even against his father. Count Walter appears with armed men. He humiliates Luisa and mocks his son. Miller protests against Walter's abuse of power. Walter orders the arrest of father and daughter Miller. Rodolfo tells him that he knows about the crime that has brought him to power. Walter hastily revokes the arrest warrant.
Walter has Miller arrested on the pretext of lèse majesté. Luisa is blackmailed by Wurm: she must have a fictitious letter dictated to her or her father will die. In this letter, she must deny her love for Rodolfo and describe Wurm as her true lover. She must swear to acknowledge that the letter was written of her own free will.
Walter tells Wurm that Rodolfo knows about the murder of Walter's predecessor that he and Wurm committed together. They then organize a confrontation between Luisa and Federica: Luisa has to reaffirm her disinterest in Rodolfo and her love for Wurm.
The letter has been leaked to Rodolfo. He cannot believe his supposed betrayal of love. He wants to fight a duel with Wurm, but the latter avoids the confrontation. Walter first hypocritically offers his son the prospect of marrying Luisa, then suggests to the desperate man that he will take revenge on Luisa by marrying Federica.
Luisa wants to die. Her father is able to stop her from committing suicide. They both want to escape and start a new life together.
Rodolfo asks Luisa to confirm that she has written the letter. Luisa says yes. Rodolfo drinks a poison he has brought with him and gives it to her to drink. When Luisa knows that she is going to die, she feels released from her vow of silence and reveals the truth. Rodolfo sees himself cursed by God. Miller can only bless his dying daughter. Before Rodolfo dies, he kills Wurm.
Verdi's opera takes place in two worlds: in a Tyrolean village and in the feudal lord's castle. Director and set designer Philipp Grigorian visualizes the village idyll through the "workers' paradise" of a company where Luisa and her father are employed. And Count Walter plans his mafia machinations in a swanky sauna.
Walter's son Rodolfo has disguised himself as if he were one of the workers in order to be close to Luisa, with whom he has fallen in love. But in doing so, he irresponsibly endangers the young woman and her father, as Count Walter has chosen a completely different partner for his son: the powerful Federica, who gets out of a pink stretch limousine and is not prepared to give up Rodolfo.
We experience the whole play not in a realistic aesthetic, but from the memory of the father Miller, who survived the death of his daughter and remembers the events as if in a surreal nightmare. This dream combines the most diverse associations - we experience the toxic events reported in Verdi's opera as a psychedelic graphic novel.
Verdi's abysmally brilliant, expressive and emotionally saturated music not only celebrates the devotion to great passions, but also makes the oppressive and repulsive disinhibition of their abysses tangible. Verdi was 36 years old when he premiered Luisa Miller in Naples in 1849. The opera was written shortly before the "popular triad" of Rigoletto, Troubadour and Traviata (1851-53). Due to the density of its musical inspiration, the opera is a fully-fledged work from Verdi's mature period, even anticipating the final image of Otello: both finales depict the jealous murder of a lover of his beloved, whom he believes to be unfaithful due to an intrigue.
From a German-speaking perspective, the radical nature of the opera is underestimated because people believe they can measure it against the original play, Schiller's bourgeois tragedy Kabale und Liebe (1784). In reality, the opera represents the culmination and end of the Italian semiseria tradition, which led love that transcended class boundaries to an always happy ending - despite painful blows of fate and misunderstandings. Here, the fragile love between the feudal lord's son and a soldier's daughter is shattered in the mills of power and marriage politics, intrigue and crime.
