Zeitgenössische Oper Berlin

"What one does must be forbidden. As though you were committing a crime"

"Tragödia – the invisible Room" is an opera only for orchestra, with no action, no dialogues, no protagonists, without a choir, without scenery or décor. The German-Roumanian composer Adriana Hölszky in her radical experiment with the genus Opera creates musical spaces which perform imagined plots of sound. The listener moves across a musical architecture in which he experiences musical gestures, movement and sound events. In contrast to the traditional music theater, in which a story is told and the singers deputize on the stage, the listener and spectator is now present on the stage because thanks to his own imagination he becomes himself a protagonist of the drama. Thus, Adriana Hölszky’s "Tragödia" is an opera without singers, but not without human beings.

The score of "Tragödia" for an orchestra of 18 musicians, audio tape and live electronics manipulates in a masterly fashion all facettes of tragedy, ghastliness and unpredictability. Adriana Hölszky composed her opera on the basis of a libretto by Thomas Körner which does not, however, appear in her work. Her music theater is supposed to derive solely from the music, without the support of words or visible action. The composer had reached the stage where she needed to experiment with the complexity and expressiveness of opera without any semantics.

After the great success and international acclaim of her operas "Bremer Freiheit", based on R. W. Fassbinder’s drama about the murderess Geesche Gottfried, and "Die Wände", inspired by Jean Genet, "Tragödia" is probably the most extreme expression of Adriana Hölszky’s credo which is: "What one does must be forbidden. As though you were committing a crime."

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