A count has designs on his personal valet's fiancée and is determined to stop their wedding taking place. Meanwhile, the countess tries to regain her husband's love by any means necessary. Mozart's great comic opera is a tale of intrigue, misunderstanding and forgiveness. Director Lydia Steier teases out the touching melancholy of the characters with the mixture of opulence and black humour. Oper! magazine’s ‘Opera house of the year’ in 2020, Staatsoper Hannover is on an artistic high and happy to share this production worldwide via OperaVision.

Gathered in the Scottish Highlands, the spirits grant the vampire, Lord Ruthwen, another year of life on the condition he sacrifices three young women within 24 hours. Although a young man Aubry knows Ruthwen is a vampire, he is sworn to secrecy. When the young man’s own lover Malwina is about to become the vampire’s next victim, Aubry has to choose between saving his bride or remaining true to his oath. Der Vampyr is by a formative figure in Hanover's musical life; the composer Heinrich Marschner led the theatre that preceded the Staatsoper, as Royal Hanoverian Kapellmeister and Intendant, for almost three decades from 1831. Marschner adapted John Polidori's novella ‘The Vampyre’, which was modelled on British dandy and writer Lord Byron. Our fascination with the bloodsucking outsider is still as strong two centuries later. Brilliant German director Ersan Mondtag and his team explore social outsiderness and the curse of immortality.