Dorothee Oberlinger: “Cultural exchange is vital!”

Since 2019, recorder player and conductor Dorothee Oberlinger has served as the artistic director of the Musikfestspiele Potsdam, the festival held in the Sanssouci Palace and its vast park, the former summer residence of Frederick II of Prussia, near Berlin. She talks about this year’s opera production, Orlando Generoso by Agostino Steffani, and the central theme of the 2025 festival: the “Grand Tour.”

In 2025, Agostino Steffani’s opera Orlando Generoso will be at the heart of the festival. Why did you choose this work?

Dorothee Oberlinger: I’ve been preparing it for a long time. Steffani’s music deeply moves me. It’s a sonic world of the high baroque, yet deeply rooted in the Renaissance and early baroque traditions. Steffani worked at the Hanover court, where French music was particularly popular. These influences—combined with the Italian vocal tradition, the dances, the virtuosic and ornamented cadences, the coloraturas, the French overtures—make his operas extremely captivating. Steffani was a close friend of Sophie Charlotte, the grandmother of Frederick the Great, originally from Hanover, where Steffani was Kapellmeister. They exchanged letters, discussed music. True, none of his works were performed in Berlin, but Sophie Charlotte knew his music. She played the harpsichord herself; she was an extraordinarily cultured woman with great artistic sensitivity. 

Today, Steffani’s music is experiencing a revival, thanks in part to Cecilia Bartoli. In 2009, the Boston Early Music Festival staged Orlando Generoso with elaborate stage machinery—a piece with an exotic subject inspired by Ariosto’s epic, involving a journey to the Emperor of Cathay (probably China). Our production with Jean Renshaw takes the opposite approach: an inner journey—into the soul, into fears, passions, awakened by love. 

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