The demands on the so-called MUSICAL THEATRE, which probably come from different directions and are therefore insoluble, almost always turn this genre into what the composer or the music theatre producer intends: his means to an end, adapted for him by him.
In my case, the lyricist places himself before the composer and demands of him that there be no singing human on stage. Because, according to the author, singing is speaking. Theatre, acting on stage is singing without notes. No less differentiated in the facets of sound, intonation, agogic, i.e. the stretching, compressing, concealing of content highs and lows. The author in me demands that the scene be theatrical, without rhythmic and time-raping musical interpretations. If music, then servile, that is, rather poor sound language, not elaborate and sacrificed to compositional thinking.
PASSWORD: messias is a theatre scene for two actresses, a stagehand and string quartet. Everything is scene, artificially organised, everything is therefore not what it pretends to be. The string quartet is not an ensemble genre, but four people who play string instruments and let themselves be burned in the deserts of music history. Everything that is played on their instruments is “allusion” and reverberation. I wrote the wind and the sand into their notes, the intangible and the sticky: Material of buzzing overtones and material of spent noise inventories.
What the two women do on stage is also a reverberation of a misunderstanding of human possibilities or impossibilities that has been approved and firmly statuated without end. They are incomprehensible and obdurate. The stagehand is an instrument yet to be invented. He is the bumbling technocrat in the mechanical space between heaven and hell. For me, the holy devil, a whisperer, a maitre de souffle.
And so everything that MUSICAL THEATRE can be comes together: a game of divergent deviousness. Far removed from OPERA, in which expression and thus shameless touching of the listener are provoked above all by the melodious emphases of the singers. As I said, far from it.
PASSWORD: Messias
Theatre scene for two actresses, a stagehand and string quartet
Commissioned work for the 2011 Pocket Opera Festival Salzburg
Music, text & direction Hans-Peter Jahn
Maria Nicola Gründel
Angel Constanze Passin
Stagehand Jürgen Palmer
