Cinderella at Komische Oper Berlin

From Rossini's La Cenerentola and Prokofiev's ballet Cinderella through to the Disney musical of the same name – the fairytale of Cinderella provides some of the most popular material for musical theatre stages around the world. Jules Massenet's Cendrillon, written at the turn of the 20th century, struck a nerve in an era of radical social and technical change, in which there was an almost boundless yearning for brief escapes from a reality which was increasingly coming to overwhelm people.

Massenet emphasises the magical and dreamlike qualities of the story, wholly focusing in his version on the happiness of the two lovers and the threats that happiness faces. The airy orchestral sounds so typical of late-Romantic French opera make the prince and Cinderella appear as beings from a world which seems to represent a bare caricature of now questionable norms and values, while also artfully referencing and exaggeratedly parodying Baroque musical forms.

This work is only rarely found on schedules in Germany – it has never yet been performed in Berlin! High time, then, for a new production – because what could be better than occasionally dreaming one's way into the fairytale love story of a prince and a girl of humble origins, especially when made to sound so beguiling by Massenet?