The Robbers

Two brothers with one problem. Franz Moor is the unloved younger child and frustrated Narcissus, for whom his own freedom begins where he can force others to their deaths. Karl, Franz Moor’s older brother, can be seen as a ray of light and a hedonistic hero who uses his student days to dispose of his father’s stifling love and become an outlaw freedom fighter. Nicolas Stemann demonstrates that Karl and Franz are really two sides of the same coin and both see freedom purely as their own by directing Schiller’s “Robbers” as a male hunting pack, sending them out onto the slopes as a four-voiced hydra, celebrating the text as a work for a speaking orchestra. As Franz the pack really fancy Amelia. Then it transforms into Karl, but then in quick succession it also plays Spiegelberg, Schufterle and the other robbers in the forests of Bohemia. This works so elegantly that Schiller’s brothers become a single Franzkarl and the “Robbers” a spoken work of art.