DER FREISCHÜTZ

A ghost story, a Singspiel, and a Berlin premiere in 1821

The piece began as horror fiction. Friedrich Kind built the libretto from Johann August Apel's tale of a fatal marksman, printed in the 1810 anthology Gespensterbuch, and Weber set it as a Romantic opera in three acts with spoken dialogue between the sung numbers. The first performance was given at the Schauspielhaus in Berlin on 18 June 1821. The story is plain: Max, a forester whose aim has deserted him, needs one good shot to marry Agathe and inherit her father's post, and Kaspar — already indebted to the demon Samiel — talks him into casting seven magic bullets at midnight in the Wolf's Glen.

It travelled fast. Within months of the Berlin premiere the opera had reached Vienna, Dresden and Leipzig, and by 1824 four separate adaptations were running in London theatres at the same time. Weber had assembled material — hunting horns, a village chorus, a bridal song and a long stretch of orchestral terror — that read as recognisably German at a moment when the stage belonged to Italian models. That is the basis of the label the work has carried ever since, the first German Romantic opera, and it is the label every modern director ends up arguing with.

The score's load-bearing walls

Two stretches of the score long ago outgrew the theatre and settled into concert programmes: the overture, and the hunters' chorus from Act III. The structural centre, though, is the Wolf's Glen finale to Act II, the bullet-casting scene, which nineteenth-century criticism rated the most expressive rendering of the gruesome to be found in any musical score. It is also the scene on which productions are judged, because Weber wrote the fear into the orchestra rather than into stage machinery, which leaves a director free to supply almost any image and still be carried by the music.

The spoken dialogue is the practical difficulty. Because the work is built on Singspiel foundations rather than continuous recitative, houses cut it, rewrite it or route round it entirely. Munich's current staging is the clearest case: the Act I confessions appear as text projected above the stage, and in Act II the characters communicate in phone messages whose wording departs a long way from Kind's libretto.

Munich's office block, five years on

Dmitri Tcherniakov's Bavarian State Opera production had its premiere on 15 February 2021 as a stream, with no audience in the house, Antonello Manacorda conducting and a cast of Pavel Cernoch as Max, Golda Schultz as Agathe, Kyle Ketelsen as Kaspar, Anna Prohaska as Annchen and Balint Szabo as Kuno. The forest is gone. Kuno is a chief executive, Max an ambitious employee and Kaspar a war veteran on the board carrying untreated trauma, all of it inside one permanent set, the wood-panelled penthouse of the company headquarters. The reading trades folk ritual for hierarchy and family power. Reviewed at four stars on its release, it was described as Tcherniakov's experimental habits largely hitting their mark, with the exception of the feminist line he tries to draw through Agathe and Annchen, which the text will not support.

The staging came back for the Munich Opera Festival and was reviewed in performance on 4 August 2026, with Daniele Rustioni conducting what one critic heard as Italianate warmth, Stanislas de Barbeyrac as Max, Ketelsen again as Kaspar, Schultz again as Agathe — smooth, unforced, precisely phrased — and Mirjam Mesak as Annchen. In this version Max is coerced into shooting a passer-by in the street, an act later revealed as staged, and the Wolf's Glen becomes an interrogation conducted with knives, disembodied voices and a long passage of maniacal dancing. The closing minutes leave it unresolved whether any of it happened outside Max's head, which drew an audible collective gasp.

Four German readings in five months of 2026

Staatstheater Nurnberg, reviewed on 12 April 2026, put Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito's staging against contemporary surveillance imagery, with drones in the air and generated pictures on the video surfaces, designs by Nina von Mechow and lighting and video by Voxi Barenklau. Roland Boer conducted, with Tristan Blanchet as Max, Julia Gruter as Agathe, Seokjun Kim as Kaspar and Veronika Loy as Annchen.

Eleven days later, on 23 April 2026, the Hamburgische Staatsoper offered the opposite temperament: Andreas Kriegenburg's production, sets by Harald B. Thor and costumes by Andrea Schraad, was judged conservative without being stuck in period. Yoel Gamzou drew notably soft orchestral textures while keeping Weber's forward drive. Clemens Sienknecht's spoken Samiel held the stage without overplaying it, Dovlet Nurgeldiyev's lyric Max and Jane Archibald's third-act cavatina took the honours, and her Act II aria was thought short of its expected brilliance. The applause was friendly with individual cheers, and the house was heavy with school parties.

Theater Bonn went in the other direction. Volker Losch's staging, reviewed on 5 May 2026 with Lothar Koenigs conducting, Kai Kluge as Max, Tobias Schabel as Kaspar and Birte Schrein as Samiel, aimed the evening squarely at the AfD. The specialist press headline called it political education delivered with a sledgehammer and complained that the opera itself was barely the point.

The most recent of the four opened out of doors. Staatstheater Braunschweig began its season on the Burgplatz on 22 August 2026 with Philipp Moschitz directing and Friedrich Praetorius conducting the Staatsorchester Braunschweig, in a staging designed for the square and running around eighteen performances into September. Costumes ranged across several periods against dark woodland, with a single enormous tree trunk as the focus, lit until it read as a pulsating biotope of spirits. Dorothea Herbert sang Agathe, Marius Pallesen Max, Joshua Bloom Kaspar, Lina Witte Samiel, Marie Maidowski Annchen and Rainer Mesecke Kuno. The review called it extraordinary, crediting demonic intensity and musical truthfulness, and treated it as a successful opening statement from new leadership.

Standing: German staple, occasional event elsewhere

The 2026 cluster describes the work's position accurately. In German-language houses it is rotating repertoire, revived often enough that four substantial new or returning stagings can land inside five months without anyone calling it a revival year. Dresden illustrates the other half of that pattern: the Semperoper's production by Axel Kohler, designed by Arne Walther with costumes by Katharina Weissenborn, lighting by Fabio Antoci and choreography by Katrin Wolfram, premiered on 1 May 2015 and plays with German and English surtitles, but carries no dates in the current season. Titles of this kind sit dormant for a year or two and then return.

What keeps directors coming back is that the plot survives being moved. A man who cannot perform, a community that polices who may marry, and a bargain signed with something that does not negotiate will carry a corporate thriller, a drone-age surveillance fable, a party-political argument or a straight folkloric telling. The 2026 reviews split on precisely that question. Braunschweig's folklore and Hamburg's restraint were credited with letting the score do the frightening; Bonn's overlay was judged to have buried the piece; Munich's was called divisive and praised anyway. The constant across all four is that the Wolf's Glen still decides the evening.