A Family Tale of Horror, The libretto of Charles Gounod’s opera La Nonne Sanglante (The Bloody Nun) is based on The Monk, a nineteenth-century bestseller by Matthew Gregory Lewis.

At the time this amalgamation of Gothic novel and religious elements met with harsh criticism. Although the premiere in Paris in 1854 was a splendid success, the new Paris theater director was strictly opposed to the opera’s mixture of sacred and secular subject matter, and so La Nonne Sanglante was dropped after only a few performances and fell into complete oblivion.

The Osnabrück Theater decided to invest its time and devoted effort in the preparation of part material for the orchestra and in the production of a score, which previously had not been available in full. As a result, Gounod’s horror story of the family feud between the Moldaws and the Luddorfs including important roles for a ghost and ancestors who haunt at night was able to celebrate its German premiere in French.

It is precisely in the ghost scenes that Gounod found his compositional inspiration: grand emotions, passionate love scenes, despair coupled with perplexity, and vigorous aggressivity spread out before us. Gounod is a master when it comes to gripping effects - and Hermann Bäumer with the Osnabrück Symphony conveys these emotional worlds with you-are-there vividness.