Die Hamletmaschine
A five-part music-theatre work for actors, singers, speaking voices, choir and orchestra, based on Heiner Müller’s play Die Hamletmaschine. The work uses spatial sound and ritualistic, nonnarrative drama.
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A five-part music-theatre work for actors, singers, speaking voices, choir and orchestra, based on Heiner Müller’s play Die Hamletmaschine. The work uses spatial sound and ritualistic, nonnarrative drama.
Loosely based on Hamlet, Müller's postmodernist drama breaks from conventional plot. In sequences of monologues, its protagonist steps out of the Hamlet role to reflect on acting and the role of intellectuals; the dense, open text also returns to feminist and ecological themes.
An opera by Paul Dessau based on Evgeny Schwartz’s play Der Drache (The Dragon).
Oedipus solves the Sphinx’s riddle and becomes king of Thebes, where a plague leads him to investigate the unsolved murder of the former king, Laius. The seer Tiresias identifies Oedipus as the killer. Oedipus gradually learns that Laius and Jocasta were his parents and that he killed his father and married his mother, as foretold. Jocasta dies by suicide; Oedipus blinds himself and is banished by Creon, leaving his children behind. Rihm fragments and reframes the myth across scenes drawing on Sophocles, Nietzsche and Heiner Müller.
Two performers take turns playing the scheming Marquise de Merteuil, the libertine Valmont, and other characters from Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, compressing the novel’s principal plot turns into a sparse, one-hour theatrical game. The action shifts between an empty salon before the French Revolution and a postwar bunker, exploring cruelty and possession in relationships.
Müller constructs a collage-like drama of revolutionary action across historical periods, interweaving theatrical scenes with lyric and narrative passages. A dreamlike, first-person sequence follows a man awaiting a mission from a powerful “No. 1,” drawing on Müller’s memory of visiting Erich Honecker in a guarded political building.
Conceived as a daylong, international music-theatre work for the 1984 Olympics, this five-act project combines sections by composers from several countries. The planned complete performance was cancelled, but four sections received productions; they include a Cologne family and political drama and a Rome act depicting figures from the American Civil War.
A five-part music-theatre work for actors, singers, speaking voices, choir and orchestra, based on Heiner Müller’s play Die Hamletmaschine. The work uses spatial sound and ritualistic, nonnarrative drama.
Loosely based on Hamlet, Müller's postmodernist drama breaks from conventional plot. In sequences of monologues, its protagonist steps out of the Hamlet role to reflect on acting and the role of intellectuals; the dense, open text also returns to feminist and ecological themes.
An opera by Paul Dessau based on Evgeny Schwartz’s play Der Drache (The Dragon).
Oedipus solves the Sphinx’s riddle and becomes king of Thebes, where a plague leads him to investigate the unsolved murder of the former king, Laius. The seer Tiresias identifies Oedipus as the killer. Oedipus gradually learns that Laius and Jocasta were his parents and that he killed his father and married his mother, as foretold. Jocasta dies by suicide; Oedipus blinds himself and is banished by Creon, leaving his children behind. Rihm fragments and reframes the myth across scenes drawing on Sophocles, Nietzsche and Heiner Müller.
Two performers take turns playing the scheming Marquise de Merteuil, the libertine Valmont, and other characters from Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, compressing the novel’s principal plot turns into a sparse, one-hour theatrical game. The action shifts between an empty salon before the French Revolution and a postwar bunker, exploring cruelty and possession in relationships.
Müller constructs a collage-like drama of revolutionary action across historical periods, interweaving theatrical scenes with lyric and narrative passages. A dreamlike, first-person sequence follows a man awaiting a mission from a powerful “No. 1,” drawing on Müller’s memory of visiting Erich Honecker in a guarded political building.
Conceived as a daylong, international music-theatre work for the 1984 Olympics, this five-act project combines sections by composers from several countries. The planned complete performance was cancelled, but four sections received productions; they include a Cologne family and political drama and a Rome act depicting figures from the American Civil War.