Lead us into
temptation!

Choose between English or Norwegian subtitles in the CC button in the player.

Premiere 26. March at 19.00.

Available until 9. April. (Short introduction in Norwegian by the Opera chef, about 3 minutes.)

Anna tries to earn money without committing a sin. A greedy family desecrates a corpse to receive an inheritance. It’s nasty, it’s hilarious and it’s ridiculously human! 

The Norwegian National Opera presents Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi as a single concert on the same night, staged by director Hanne Tømta. 

The Seven Deadly Sins

Anna and her sister are from Louisiana. To support their family, they travel to seven American cities in order to earn enough money over seven years to buy a house on the Mississippi River. Anna wants to provide for her family without committing any of the deadly sins. This proves to be impossible. During their journey, they encounter all seven of them: sloth, pride, wrath, gluttony, lust, greed and envy.

The Seven Deadly Sins is the brainchild of the dynamic duo Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, who experienced their breakthrough together with The Threepenny Opera in 1928. The Seven Deadly Sins, written in 1933, was their most successful co-creation. It is teeming with irony and ambiguity, enhanced by the duality of the main character. 

Anna and her sister of the same name are two sides of the same person. The one is beautiful and emotional, the other practical and sensible. The one is sung by Eli Kristin Hanssveen of the Norwegian National Opera, the other danced by the Norwegian National Ballet’s Georgie Rose. 

Gianni Schicchi

One man's noise is another man's music! As an elderly man takes his final breath, the starting shot is fired for a relentless pursuit of his money. His last will and testament is in the hands of ‘fat monks’ – but perhaps the trickster Gianni Schicchi can help the desperate family strike while the body is still warm? 

Gianni Schicchi is part of the trilogy Il trittico, which premiered for the first time in 1819. Puccini’s only comic opera plays like a short film, but also has less dramatic elements, such as Lauretta’s famous aria ‘O mio babbino caro’, in which she prays that her father, Gianni Schicchi, will allow her to marry her lover Rinuccio.

Connections

The inspiration for Gianni Schicchi came from a passage in Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, in which the deadly sins play a leading role. It was written in the aftermath of World War I, while Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins premiered the same year as Hitler rose to power in 1933. Both are critical of a capitalist society. And family plays a major role in both – as a mini-world we all try to navigate, with varying degrees of success.  

Weill’s music is influenced by jazz and cabaret, though also by Italian music, given that Weill studied music in Italy. The funeral march in Gianni Schicchi is also reminiscent of music Weill wrote to Brecht’s texts. As a result, these works also have various musical connections, in spite of their differences and even though Gianni Schicchi is technically an opera and The Seven Deadly Sins a ‘sung ballet’ (ballet chanté).