Benjamin Button

In 1860, Benjamin Button was born in Baltimore not as a sweet little boy, but as a bearded old man. His fate is predetermined: He goes through life backwards and gets younger every day. When he finally meets Hildegarde, who is almost thirty years younger, at the age of fifty, everything is at stake for him, who has never been loved because of his strange life history; not least because Benjamin is ostracized by society because of his special circumstances. His love for Hildegarde cannot last, because while she ages inexorably, Benjamin becomes younger and younger, until he finally becomes a baby in his own son's house.

It was the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald who reported this incident in a whimsically original short story from 1922. In 2008, it was successfully filmed with Brad Pitt in the leading role. Now Reinhard Febel, who worked for many years as a professor of composition at the Salzburg Mozarteum, adapts this humorously impressive reflection on the phenomena of time, age, youth, becoming and passing for the opera stage.