Amphitryon

Oboussier's opera, freely after Molière and Kleist, runs on the oldest trick in the mythology: Jupiter takes Amphitryon's shape to spend a night with Alkmene, and the real husband comes home to find that somebody else has been him, more convincingly. In Kleist's hands the question becomes how Alkmene is meant to know whom she loves. The work reached the stage on 13 March 1951 in West Berlin and, the same day, in Dresden — a divided country giving one opera two premieres. Weimar plays it in German with surtitles.