Deutsche Oper Berlin – 100 Years

For its 100th anniversary the Deutsche Oper Berlin presents a special edition of live recordings – from the beginnings of television broadcasts from the opera house. This special edition box contains the live recordings from the 1960s – treasures in black and white featuring the greatest opera stars of the 20th century in unforgotten roles and settings.
On 24 September 1961 „Sender Freies Berlin“ (SFB, now RBB) presented the re-opening of the Deutsche Oper Berlin with Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” on television. It was the first transmission of an opera by SFB, which had been founded seven years before. Television productions of performances from the Deutsche Oper Berlin became frequent, practically annual afterwards. However most of these partly legendary recordings have not been shown for decades: the outdated policy of the broadcasting stations ensuring them only limited transmission rights
of the performers resulted in these recordings being locked away in the archives, labelled as restricted or “protected”, and therewith concealing them from the eyes and ears of the public. Three years ago Deutsche Oper Berlin and Arthaus Musik, in apprehension of the 100 years jubilee of the opera house, decided to leave nothing unattempted in order to liberate the recordings from their coma in the archives and to select the most important ones for an extensive DVD edition. It took two years of research, discussions and negotiations with the performers of those productions (or their heirs) as well as to some extent complex and elaborate restorations on the film material, until the first recording in this series, the opening performance of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” from 1961, was released. In the meantime the series includes six recordings, and at least five more are to follow.