Benjamin Button

About

In 1860, Benjamin Button was born in Baltimore not as a cute little brat, but as a bearded old man. His fate is predetermined for him: he goes through life backwards and gets younger day by day. When, at the age of fifty, he finally meets Hildegarde, who is almost thirty years his junior, everything is at stake for him, as he has previously been excluded from society and never loved due to his special living conditions. The love for Hildegarde cannot last, because while she ages inexorably, Benjamin becomes younger and younger until he finally becomes a baby in the house of his own son. It was the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald who reported this incident in a bizarre and original short story from 1922. It was made into a successful film in 2008 with Brad Pitt in the lead role. Now Reinhard Febel, who worked as a composition professor at the Salzburg Mozarteum for many years, is adapting this humorous and impressive reflection on the phenomena of time, identity, age, youth, growth and decay for the opera stage.