The song of the sperm whale

Venue: Kammer - Everyone knows him: Hermann Melville's Moby Dick. An eternal symbol of nature's immense secrets and man's hubris and lust for murder. It was far less known, indeed almost unknown, that the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini wrote a Grande Opera on a similar theme barely half a century later. In the theatre evening The Song of the Sperm Whale, the German Theatre ensemble sets out in search of this long-lost opera and in doing so reaches the depths of the present day: art and capital, calauers and commerce, whale rescue and election campaign — an open-air comedy with music washed by the sound of the seas.

Heiner Bomhard is a director, author and composer. At DT, he was the player and musical mastermind behind the two cult musicals by Rosa von Praunheim: Hitler's Goat and the King's Hemorrhoids came on stage in 2020, Die Insel der Perversen 2024. With The Song of the Sperm Whale, Bomhard is now switching to serious operas. It's going to be tragic. And dramatic. And uplifting in all creaturality. Sperm whale word of honor.

E dalle onde si erge

Possente e potente una creatura

More big di tutte le altre.

O mondo! Come hai potuto creare un essere simile!

And rising from the floods

Powerful and powerful, one being

Bigger than anything else.

O world! How could you create such beings!