Music Theatre since 1990 - Schott Music

Synopsis
As early as the year 1779 Mozart’s Zaïde posed questions about the possibility of a dialogue
between the Occident and the Orient. Zaïde was never completed and exists only as a fragment:
the overture, the dialogues and the finale are all missing and the outcome of the story
remains unclear. The Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin responds to Mozart’s incomplete work
with Adama. In Adama (Hebrew: adama = earth, adam = man, dam = blood) she has composed
an independent musical sound space and has regarded the operatic subject from a contemporary
perspective. Whereas Zaïde describes the conflict between civilisations using the story of a
European couple who are in love and held in slavery in a foreign Oriental country, the situation
described by Chaya Czernowin touches on the question of freedom and imprisonment from a
different dimension. The lovers themselves speak two different languages and encounter each
other as foreigners, as a man from Palestine and an Israeli woman. Adama is therefore not the
completion of a Mozart fragment and the overall project Zaïde / Adama is not a closed entity:
rather, it tries to find corresponding and contradictory features in an incomplete historical work.
Thus, the various musical spheres are interwoven and enter a dialogue. This interplay of sound
opens up the possibility of hearing each different musical cosmos with purified ears, and of
discovering unforeseen common features.
Zaïde · Adama
17.08.2006 Salzburger Festspiele
Czernowin doesn’t enter into competition with Mozart as a composer, but creates a new space of
sounds and noises which is very suggestive, and seems to find its way into the psyche of any listener
[...] You are able to listen to the music of Mozart’s Zaïde in a totally new way and discover
a timeless truth behind Mozart’s beautiful musical sound-scape. Zaïde – Adama was without a
doubt the most important performance during the Mozart Cycle in Salzburg (Salzburger Mozart
Zyklus) in the year 2006. (Opernwelt 11/2006)
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