The pan­to­mime "Der Traum" [lit. The Dream] with a scen­ario by P. Flori­an Reichssiegel premiered on Feb­ru­ary 25th, 1767 in the small aud­it­or­i­um of the Salzburg Uni­versity and was Mi­chael Haydn's first com­pos­i­tion for the uni­versity theatre. The prom­in­ent fea­tures of this piece are tu­mul­tu­ous ac­tions, sur­pris­ing ma­chinery ef­fects, and the com­bin­a­tion of char­ac­ters from the Com­media dell' arte, Greek and Ro­man myth­o­logy, as well as ori­ent­al ele­ments. The li­ais­on of real and un­real ba­sic ele­ments of a dream with its fanci­ful turn­arounds is ideally re­vived by means of the shad­ow pup­pet theatre.

Drawn by light and shad­ow, Georg Jen­isch cre­ates an amus­ing and fanci­ful at­mo­sphere set to the vivid mu­sic of Mi­chael Haydn’s. Through the ad­di­tion­al cine­mat­ic trans­forma­tion, this pan­to­mime de­picts a top­ic­al inter­pret­a­tion of the pop­u­lar amuse­ment theatre from Haydn’s time. This fig­ure-film - visu­ally based on hand-craf­ted pup­pets and stage set­tings with at­ten­tion to de­tail - is both a con­tri­bu­tion to the theatre his­tory of Salzburg and a trib­ute to an al­most for­got­ten art form. When it comes to amaz­ing today's audi­ences with a spell bind­ing spec­tacle, the ma­gic­al vis­ions of the shad­ow pup­pet theatre can eas­ily keep up with di­git­al an­im­a­tions.

With the sup­port of the County of Salzburg.