Séraphin
by
Wolfgang Rihm (*1952)
first performance: 1996, Stuttgart
Premiere
in Berlin:
20th November
2003
Haus
der Berliner Festspiele
Foto: Iko Freese
| Zeitgenössische Oper Berlin |
| 8th October
2005 6:00 p.m. Teatro alle Tese, Biennale di Venezia, 49th International Festival of Contemporary Music |
|
Séraphin Premiere
in Berlin:
Foto: Iko Freese |
|
|
Musical Director Acrobats Actor Mezzosoprano I |
Rüdiger
Bohn Sabrina Hölzer and Mirella Weingarten öff öff
productions, Bern Miguel Angel Gaspar Márta Rózsa Orchestra of the Zeitgenössischen Oper Berlin |
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Wolfgang Rihm calls his work for eight voices and ten instrumentalists an experiment. Central to his searching is Antonin Artaud, the radical, the uncompromising, the warrior of theater. He, too, experimented, created and made new beginnings. A theater of cruelty. Inexorable, merciless, irrevocable. Artaud’s text „Séraphin“ and Charles Baudelaire’s essay of the same name, dealing with the effects of opium, were Rihm’s sources in his search for a piece of music theater which freshly explores the magic of collective experience beyond language and illustration. A form of theater not based on a dramatic plot, but which instead is itself the drama. Theater as its own text. Cruel, because it rejects the division between art and life. If one immerses oneself in Rihm‘s almost vegetative music, one may begin to hallucinate, as under the influence of drugs. The sounds are dangerous as they become reality, like the fantasies of someone who is at the high point of intoxication. With the acrobats of the internationally renowned Swiss group „öff öff“, whose art springs from their uncompromising involvement in their task, and with the Mexican actor Miguel Angel Gaspar, who is specializing in experimental forms of motion, Sabrina Hölzer and Mirella Weingarten explore the world created with Rihm’s music. Pictures which are almost hallucinogenic, performances and extreme situations create a kind of theatrical search below the level of language which Artaud wanted to transcend in order to take hold of life. In his experiment of music theater Wolfgang Rihm follows Artaud‘s words who said: „If there is anything infernal, anything really nefarious in our time, it is the adherence to form instead of being, like the condemned who, while being burned, are sending signals from their funeral pyre“.In
Cooperation with the Berliner Festspiele - financed by the Culture
Foundation for the Capital of the Federal Republic of Germany and the
Ministry for Science, Research and Culture - with support from the Ernst
von Siemens Musikstiftung, the Stiftung Kulturfonds and the Berlin Artists Program of the
DAAD. |
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