Music Theatre since 1990 - Schott Music

Synopsis
The opera takes its subject from Christian Morgenstern’s ‘Egon and Emilie’ of 1907, which
depicts the theatre as a distorting mirror of life: Emilie needs a person to talk to, but because
she does not find one she has ‘to leave this stage and go into the nameless nothingness, having
neither played nor lived’. The void of a failed artistic existence is revealed behind the theatre’s
comedy.
Ninety years on, Widmann’s K(l)eine Morgenstern-Szene (1997) brilliantly translates the play’s
anguish into operatic terms. The lead soprano feels unable to find her onstage identity as
Emilie: she needs the person facing her to utter a word, just one word. It doesn’t even have to
be the word ‘love’—any word breaking the silence would do. In order for this to happen, the
trained singer uses every possible technique she ever learnt and exploits her repertoire with
enormous creativity: “operetta-like”, “uptight”, “whining”, “oriental”, “ugly”, “in an official
tone”, “in dialect”: she sings, roars, talks and whispers. The musicians accompany her by exploring
a wide range of different ways of playing. As the tension builds, more and more percussion
enter the fray. But all of this is to no avail: Emilie can’t find her role and the performance turns
into a rehearsal for which no resolution is possible.
K(l)eine Morgenstern-Szene
05.10.2005 Mousonturm, Frankfurt
Widmann works with all the methods of the musical past, stepping across the boundaries of
different genres, including pop and the operatic gestures of a prima donna [...]. In this remarkably
successful monologue Widmann gives anybody worried about the future of music theatre a wink
and a wave. (Olaf A. Schmitt, Frankfurt 2005)
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