Members of the Berlin Philharmonic / Corinna Harfouch / Stefan Wilkening

Heroic epic as music theatre

The Odyssey, the great heroic epic of Europe, fascinates to this day. Its characters are firmly anchored in the collective memory of the world. Odysseus, the Greek hero of the Trojan War, excels in cunning and cleverness during his ten-year odyssey. His brilliant ideas enable him to master any situation, no matter how seemingly hopeless. On his long journey, he encounters the beautiful sea nymph Calypso, man-eating Cyclops, seductive sirens, while his wife Penelope has to fend off an ever-growing crowd of pressing suitors in his homeland of Ithaca. The epic has also inspired the Berlin composer Thilo Thomas Krigar throughout his life. In 1997, he turned it into a fascinating piece of modern music theatre, which is now being performed at the Elbphilharmonie.