In MusikTheater an der Wien’s fast-paced and witty production of Der Prozess by Gottfried von Einem, Stefan Herheim interprets the most famous and most disturbing court case in the history of literature.

Together with a superb cast, Stefan Herheim demonstrates how gripping and strikingly relevant Kafka’s work remains more than 100 years after the author’s death. Gottfried von Einem’s rarely performed opera premiered in 1953, at a time when the popularity of Kafka’s work had reached its first peak. His music – arranged by Tobias Leppert as a chamber opera and conducted by Walter Kobéra – uses pulsing rhythms, recurring structures, and echoes of jazz and twelve-tone music to evoke the novel’s subtle terror while never losing sight of the grotesque humour of the source material.