Schaum is an experimental chamber opera that joyfully blurs the line between neighborhood bar and opera house. With humorous and affection it explores the shared rituals, emotions, and contradictions of these seemingly distant social spaces—dissolving the boundaries between subculture and high culture.

Conceived as an adaptive pub opera, Schaum is built around a flexible musical and narrative framework that reshapes itself for each venue. Every performance draws on the stories, characters, and atmosphere of the specific bar it inhabits, weaving local history directly into the music, libretto, and staging. The opera’s first incarnation premiered to great acclaim in September at the cooperatively run cultural pub Horner Eck in Bremen.

Composed by the duo Hauptmeier | Recker, Schaum is performed by opera singers Andrea Conangla and Lidia Luciano, with Conangla also taking on the role of director. The sonic world extends far beyond the classical operatic stage: pre-produced electronics meet a live band formed by the composers themselves—drums, electric guitar, electric bass, synthesizers, and piano—alongside a local pub choir of 15–20 voices and an amateur ensemble made up of regulars and bar staff.

At its core, Mit Schaum is driven by music that refuses to stay in one place. Classical opera quotations collide with new music, experimental electronics, band aesthetics, and genre-crossing hybrids. A reimagined “Voi che sapete” from Le nozze di Figaro appears as a karaoke moment, while elsewhere a dense, almost baroque contrapuntal duet rides atop a pounding hardstyle techno beat before dissolving into a contemporary “Neue Musik” like aria while the voice manipulations and harmonizers subtly echoing the textures of modern pop.

Thematically, Schaum circles around community, collective experience, and the great operatic constants of life, above all, love, in all its radiant and shadowed forms. These familiar motifs are reframed within a contemporary, queer perspective, allowing them to surface anew: intimate, messy, celebratory, and deeply human—just like the spaces in which the opera takes place.