Once upon a time, a Prince was hunting at night, his name was Prince Arindal and he encounters a beautiful fairy called Ada. It was love at first sight and they fell in love immediately. Arindal decides that he should always be at Ada's side in the fairy realm. The Fairy king warns that if Arindal should ever leave Ada alone for longer than a year, then she will turn into stone. The Prince finds himself having to leave Ada- will he be back in time? This "Oper für Kinder" version has been shortened down to a compact 45 minutes from the original 3 hour opera.

The young composer Max is due to marry Agathe, but before his wedding he must finish his opera on which he has been working for quite some time. Despite all his efforts, Max is plagued by worries that he will fail to complete the piece and so makes almost no progress. Visions and hallucinations haunt him, the boundaries between dream and reality seem to blur and overlap. Caspar tries to persuade him finally to give in to the hidden and dark creative powers within him and so overcome his inability to write; Caspar’s efforts are finally rewarded.

Film adaptation by Straub and Huillet of Hölderlin’s 1798 tragedy on the symbolic death of Empedocles, the legislator in Ancient Greece.