La notte di un nevrastenico- Nino Rota
Il segreto di Susanna- Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari

University for Music and Theatre, Leipzig 
Diretor: Max Nattkämper
Stage and costume design: Elena Popova
Music director: Ulrich Pakusch
Trailer and photography: Jannic Borchert

‘Our century is civilised! Rational and functional! ‘ This sentence by the Commendatore in ‘La notte di un nevrastenico’ makes you stop. Rota's one-act play, which is set in the present day according to director's instructions, premiered in 1959, just a few years after the world had been thrown apart at the seams by the world war and the horrors of fascism and civilisation had collapsed. And indeed, in their play, Rota and librettist Bacchelli present a grotesque array of characters who fail to cope with everyday normality and are trapped in an exaggerated state of insomnia.

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The different characters in the two plays are stranded in a hotel at night. Occasionally someone new arrives, others have been vegetating for a long time and are waiting - for whatever. In a world in which consciences have been lost, it is still the rituals of everyday life that remain for the characters and enable them to maintain facades. But what remains at the end? Perhaps the thought that we are all temporary guests in a random constellation of people on this world before we return to silence.

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