The Chinese composer Qu Xiao-song has written three operas so far. They were produced in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris. Now, for the first time, a German group has dared to approach a music theater work by Qu: The Zeitgenössische (Contemporary) Oper Berlin has shown "Life on a String" in the Hebbel-Theater Berlin – translated to a slightly operatic German title as "Die letzte Saite". However, it was sung and spoken neither in German nor in English (the latter being after all offered by the score), but in Chinese with German subtitles.

Before returning to China last year to teach composition at the Shanghai Conservatory, Qu Xiao-song had lived in New York for ten years. He was among the first to be admitted to the newly re-opened Beijing Conservatory. Previously, the cultural revolution had sent Qu to the farmers in the provinces for four years in order to exorcise his musical nonsense. Today he does not consider this as lost time. He says that when, at the age of 26, he finally was able to begin his academic studies, he had not only taught himself to play the violin, but had also discovered in what was left of a rural people’s culture a way of making music that was integrated into a life close to nature which henceforth greatly influenced his musical horizon. He was, so to say, immunized against the impositions of a postrevolutionary neo-academism.

Qu’s music is characterized by the power of individual notes and the silence between the sounds, as well as the intention to create elementary emotional resonances with quite reduced musical means. One may argue about whether, as an enlightened Western listener, one should trust these means. When a year ago the Radio Choir Berlin produced the first performance of Qu’s cantata "Rain", it was received with a great deal of booing. The simple dramaturgy and the syncretic music language were seen rather sceptically by a number of experts. "Life on a String", written in 1998, is, by contrast, a much more austere work: a monodrama rather than an opera. The stage belongs to only one figure, the blind story teller Laohan. According to the prophesy he will be able to see again once the thousandth string of his instrument has broken. In expectation of this moment he untiringly tells the villagers his stories. The dramatics of this seventy minute recitation derives from the repeated sudden transformation of the story into moments of a dramatized present in which the narrator himself becomes the theme of the story, his own history the action on stage. All elements of the theater, defined in detail in the score, participate in this transformation: from the speech song, which requires the bass singer to also produce the falsetto register, to the lighting which carries the space of the story into the room on stage. And now and then, from the fringe of the stage, musicians and conductor mix into the recital with questions, requests and shouts at the storyteller.

Thus the audience become spectators of spectators, which makes this work, written for Western listeners, gain its inner truth. For the exotic play maintains its distance. Music and action fuse to a single music-language-stage-body, an organism which also includes sounds by the musicians resembling speech as well as the creation of tonal noises by other devices. While originally the narrator only follows the thread of his stories, the music sounds primarily illustrative and punctating, as a servant to the libretto. But as the story telling converts into the experience proper, the music offers captivating moments in which it actually absorbs the narration and leads it on in unexpected ways. This advancing process of spiritualization is illustrated by a shifting from the more spectacular percussive effects to the sounds of wind and string instruments. In comparison with the first production in Brussels, the principal performer and bass voice, Gong Dong-jian, was able to enhance his performance even more in this meticulously prepared Berlin showing. He succeeded in tying up all the facets of his role with its many ruptures into a general expression which developed convincingly towards the close. Fortunately, the stage director, Sabrina Hölzer, relied entirely on the power of the narrative in the way in which she blended text and music together with the main performer in a rarely achieved blissful combination.