Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

Cinema in the opera house: a musically and cinematically unique event awaits you at Düsseldorf Opera House when a milestone in film history meets a new musical creation from the pen of electro pioneer and Kraftwerk legend Karl Bartos.

A surreal play with delusions and dreams, with fantasies and somnambulism, with visions and different levels of time and action: Robert Wiene's 1920 silent film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is considered an expressionist masterpiece - and is also the first psychological thriller in film history.

For twenty years, Karl Bartos nurtured a passion for this probably most influential German silent film of all time and set about tailoring the experimental film an equally experimental new sound garment: The result is an acoustic code that translates the more than 100-year-old film artwork into the here and now, transforming the centuries-spanning sound of a symphony orchestra into electronics, and a sound architecture that uses sounds and noises of the narrated world and musicalized language to do away with the separation of image and sound owed to the time. With this sophisticated sound design, Bartos not only lifts the classic into our time: “(...) the demonic aura of ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ is given an unimagined heightening by Karl Bartos' excellent new setting” (Michael Köhler, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).

With this work, the originally classically trained Karl Bartos returns to an old place of activity: after studying percussion at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf, he played alongside experimental ensembles at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein before being invited by Kraftwerk to join their Autobahn U.S. tour (1975). This was followed by a legendary music career as co-author of Kraftwerk classics, including “Das Model”, “Die Roboter” and “Tour de France”, crowned by his induction into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame.