After Ernest Bloch's Macbeth and Aribert Reimann's Lear Keith Warner, one of the great Shakespeare interpreters of our time, will direct yet another opera based on a work by the Elizabethan playwrite. The Tempest - food for musical interpretation for Purcell, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Berio - comes from Shakespeare's final creative period. The story takes place on an island in the ocean which its bizarre inhabitants - including the mis-shapened witch's son Caliban and the effervescent air spirit Ariel - share with Prospero and his daughter. Prospero had been sent into exile by his brother. While marooned on the island he has developed magical powers which he uses to create a storm which causes a passing ship to sink. Among those who survive the wreckage are the King of Naples, his son Ferdinand, brother Sebastian and Prospero's enemy and brother, Antonio. After all sorts of complications everything bodes well for a happy journey home.
Thomas Adès, born in 1971, and - according to Simon Rattle - presently »England's greatest talent« dared, with his librettist Meredith Oakes, to replace Shakespeare's highly stylised poetic blank verse with present day language combined with rhyming couplets and other forms of rhyme. This language, said the librettist, accents Shakespeare's magical, ritual and childish elements. Adès' lyric musical language is almost impressionistic, with layers of richly coloured symphonic elements which allow the singers to be heard. In Adès'opera it is Caliban, the cynic, and not the all forgiving Prospero who has the last word.