Music Theatre since 1990 - Schott Music

Synopsis
In the early hours of September 25th 1940: Walter Benjamin and Lisa Fittko escape from the
Fascists and find their way to Port Bou on the Spanish border. Exhausted by the arduous climb
across the Pyrenees, Lisa leaves Benjamin as night sets in, intending to return the next morning
in the hope of leading him over the mountains to safety.
Left on his own Benjamin suppresses his fear with morphine. He spends his last night before
committing suicide in a waking dream. Images of his past haunt him: his imprisonment in Paris,
the evacuation to the camps and his childhood. Benjamin realizes that he has always been
an outsider. Two angels, as in Paul Klee’s drawing, face him with the choice between life and
death. One promises him freedom and the chance of a new life (from which he is only a few
hours away). But the other angel, Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’, draws him closer: Benjamin can’t
escape the destructive power of the angel of death.
Winterreise
24.08.1994 Internationale Musikfestwochen Luzern
Isolation, cold, homelessness: Benjamin the hopeless non-conformist, both the eternal outsider and
observer, aware of both himself and his environment, a man who suffers from his hopelessness, but
also exploits it [...] The heart of the musical material is an altered motive of the “Wegweiser” (Song
20 of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise).
(Ingomar Grünauer, Source: Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden 1997)
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