Christian Jost says of his work that he ‘extracts something new from Schumann's harmonic material, takes it further (...) and enters the spaces whose doors Schumann pushed open’. Florentine, how did you deal with the possibility of filling these newly created spaces?
Florentine: For me, theatre is collective art, which is why every production starts as a team, even here at the university. In discussions with the two set designers Carla Schwering and Yvonne Schäfer, with the dramaturge Heiko Voss and of course with Kai, who suggested this work, we opened up associative spaces that span an arc from the Romantic period to the present day. Unfulfilled love, the longing for nature, for death, dreams, travelling (in and to oneself), ‘not arriving’ are all themes that continue to move and touch us today, perhaps even more than ever.
The most important question for us was how concrete we want to be on stage, what kind of story does Dichterliebe tell? If you translate the quote from Christian Jost in your question, it doesn't mean that Schumann asked the questions and Jost is now providing the answers with his composition. I would rather say that Jost intensifies the state of limbo in which our ‘lyrical ego’ finds itself. It oscillates between dream and nightmare, in which thoughts crystallise again and again and are then expressed in the songs. In the end, we decided on a place in public space where strangers meet by chance and form a small community for a short time (or even longer).
The process was unusual for our opera class this time, because at the beginning of the rehearsals there was only a musical division of the songs, but no allocation of roles, no pre-existing characters and no plot. Everyone ‘only’ had musical material from which a character had to emerge. On the one hand, this gives you a great deal of freedom to create your own character, but it also requires a lot more personal responsibility towards yourself and the rest of the ensemble. Once we knew roughly which characters we wanted to tell, we started to improvise. This resulted in a story in which each member of the ensemble took their own specific place. The work was therefore very intense because all the participants were able and had to contribute personally.
Love, with its many different exceptional psychological situations, is the overarching theme in Schumann's song cycle - how do you summarise your concept in a work that doesn't tell a causal story and ‘ploughs’ such a wide range of emotions?
Florentine: By making no claim to completeness, but by telling only excerpts from the lives of the characters involved, snapshots, sometimes fleeting encounters that sometimes seem to be forgotten in the next moment - or we are not sure whether they took place at all. That's why the people in our story don't have names, they are examples of many other fates or life models. They come and go, wait for each other or have just been left, fall in love or fall out of love again and move on. What remains is something sketchy, something that could have been.
How do you feel about bringing music that follows a very specific listening habit (in this case Robert Schumann's art song) to the stage in a completely different context? What musical challenges are there for the singers, who all study opera singing, in dealing with and mixing these different art forms?
Kai: The appeal of this production lies precisely in thinking and working ‘out of the box’. Song singing requires a special sensitivity and quality in dealing with the voice. It is particularly unusual to bring the lieder singing to the stage as part of a staged production and to divide the sixteen songs between an ensemble.
Florentine: From a scenic perspective, the brevity of the songs poses a great challenge in terms of expressing oneself as a performer. No sooner has a song begun than it's over again, which means that our ensemble has unusually little text to communicate. This makes the interludes all the more important; the ensemble is on stage almost continuously and has to develop a sure sense of focus and non-verbal communication in order to tell a story together.
Kai: Christian Jost's Dichterliebe is about a specific approach to lieder singing. The texts by Heinrich Heine and the melodies by Robert Schumann form the starting point of his score, but he expands the musical form and the instrumental sound spectrum considerably. Schumann's songs float by - for the most part in their original form - as part of an oscillating maelstrom of sound and motif material. You spoke of ‘spaces’ above. Jost expands Schumann's original form of the composition with a completely independent level of colours and moods and thus opens up entirely new sound spaces. His score is by no means merely an orchestration of the romantic song cycle, but an absolutely original new composition in which one can permanently sense his deep connection with Schumann. In terms of interpretation, our seven singers face their very own challenges on stage, looking at Schumann through the eyes of Christian Jost.
Our colleague Pauliina Tukiainen worked with our students in a masterclass on the original form of Heine's and Schumann's song cycle. This was a great and instructive experience for all of us and a successful example of a valuable artistic exchange between different disciplines - just as it should be at an arts university.
In your production, the ‘lyrical I’ is divided between seven singers with different vocal ranges. What does this multiplication of protagonists do to the work - both in terms of content and music?
Florentine: In terms of content, we transfer the theme of an individual to an entire society by multiplying the ego. On the one hand, all the characters seem very individual at first, but on the other hand there are moments when our characters almost merge with each other and speak or sing ‘from one mouth’. The emotion of one person thus becomes a collective experience - and vice versa. Making different inner parts of one and the same person ‘visible’ is now a common approach in psychology in order to understand a person in their entire spectrum. This means that our ensemble partly forms an ego group that has more in common than it realises. On the other hand, in our highly individualised society, we often have the impression that we are completely alone in the sense of being ‘special’ with our emotions and special experiences, alone among many egos. Being part of a collective can sometimes be very comforting.
Kai: For many years, Christian Jost has curated the ‘2x hören’ series at the Berlin Konzerthaus, which is all about listening to a mostly unknown contemporary work twice and finding out more about the music in conversation. Original quote: ‘Be surprised how much your ears open up when you hear the piece for the second time.’ Without wanting to get ahead of myself, I can reveal that we will also encounter Jost's composition of Dichterliebe twice in succession in our production. Due to the double staged realisation of the work, which was originally conceived purely musically, we experience the majority of the songs sung by different performers. The songs therefore ‘sound’ different and, in addition, the varied scenic context - without giving too much away - requires a completely different listening perspective. In this sense, I would like to expand on the quote from the Berliner Konzerthaus: ‘Be surprised how much your eyes and ears have opened when the piece is heard for the second time.’ In addition to narrative stringency, our production is based on a multitude of links and breaks (from Heine to Schumann, from Jost to us) that challenge our audience and leave them confused in the best sense - an imponderable search for clues from a cold today deep into 19th century German Romanticism.
The Ensemble for Contemporary Music at the Mozarteum University, newly founded in 2024, will be part of an opera production by your class for the first time. What synergies will there be?
Kai: Last summer semester was the starting signal for the new ensemble. In addition to a concert with seven world premieres by composition students, we performed three master's concerts by graduates of the composition programme. In the summer, we were guests with the ensemble at the ‘La Chigiana’ festival in Siena. I am delighted that the new formation has been so well received: We have already received invitations from Wien Modern and other Austrian and international festivals. In addition to our main task of being there for the students of our composition department, I am delighted that the ensemble can also grow and mature through other tasks.
This academic year, both music theatre productions have been offered to our class: In addition to Dichterliebe, the ensemble will also perform the world premiere of the new music theatre work by French composer Yann Robin based on a libretto by Elisabeth Gutjahr in June. It is a very valuable experience for the ensemble to be able to work with established composers. Conversely, it is important that the serious engagement with contemporary repertoire at the Mozarteum University is also recognised ‘from the outside’.
