Live performance from the Salzburg Festival, 6 August 2012.

Juliane Banse, Cornelia Kallisch, Shawn Mathey, Martin Gantner, Ruben Drole and Alfred Muff star in this acclaimed adaptation of German composer Robert Schumann's opera "Genoveva," produced by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Inspired by the works of Johann Ludwig Tieck and Christian Friedrich Hebbel, Schumann's tale centers on an ill-fated countess who finds her life turned upside down when she's falsely accused of adultery.

It is love at first sight when the knight Walther von Stolzing first meets the goldsmith’s daughter, Eva. But tradition trumps love in 19th-century Nuremberg. Her father has decreed there’s only one way to win Eva’s hand in marriage, and that’s to join Nuremberg’s guild of competitive singers—and beat them all in song.

Through the power of a love potion, Tristan and Isolde have fatefully fallen for each other, but Princess Isolde is promised to Marke, the king and Tristan's liege lord. The lovers live their connection in secret, which inevitably has to be discovered and leads to catastrophe. The visually stunning production by Marco Arturo Marelli prepares the ground for the secret of this love in space and color, captured in Richard Wagner's opera, which premiered in 1865, in which the music becomes almost the sole carrier of the plot.

Spanish opera and theater director Calixto Bieito makes his debut with this grand romantic opera at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, guiding the audience through his powerful interpretation. Elsa von Brabant is accused of fratricide, but no one dares to prove her innocence in this inexplicable case. Trapped in a reality that no one shares with her, a man enters her life, promising to fight for her—on one condition: Elsa must trust him blindly and never ask his name or origin. An intrigue causes Elsa to break her promise. The truth brings her brother back and reveals his divine origin, but she pays a heavy price.

It is about nothing less than love. This is what the Wartburg singing community asks for, and this is what Tannhäuser also seeks: he finds almost endless lust with the goddess of love Venus, and hopes to attain bliss with the "pure" Elisabeth. In his vacillation between satisfaction and renunciation, between guilt and protest, in being torn between fulfillment and exaltation, he corresponds entirely to the grammar of the Romantic age - and still speaks directly to us today.