Der Hetzer

Handlung
"Joe Coltello is different. He is not from around here. He looks different from us. Perhaps he even speaks with a slight accent. Surely, he cannot be trusted... What ensues is a story as old as time: Coltello is othered, harassed, slandered even. Jealousy and tacit racism turn into bullying and eventually spiral into murder. 

Jealousy, slander, and murder. These three timeless themes are the central focus in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello (1603). More than three centuries later, in 1887, the Italian composer Guiseppe Verdi would use Shakespeare’s text as the starting point for a four-act opera, likewise to be titled Otello. Today, and again more than a century later, Lang repeats this cycle by re-writing Verdi’s masterpiece. In Der Hetzer (2019–20), Verdi’s late-romantic opera becomes a forceful, jazz-infused political commentary on pressing current issues such as migration and ethnic bias. In the intervals between the four acts, the composer invites young, local talent to the stage and asks hip-hop artists, rappers, and DJ’s to comment on their own experiences with the opera’s central themes. The message could not be more clear: while a lot has changed since the seventeenth century, the fear of the faceless ‘other’ has intensified and is perhaps more polarising and dangerous than ever. "
Programmhinweise, G. Ricordi & Co. Bühnen- und Musikverlag, abgerufen am 18.09.2025 [https://www.ricordi.com/en-US/Catalogue.aspx/details/451213]

Auftrag: Oper Dortmund (Deutschland), gefördert durch die Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung

Uraufführung
26. September 2021