Salzburg puts on ‘an opera without singers’

This may save a lot of rehearsal time.

From today’s programme release:

When the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell came across Kassandra, a 1983 novella by the East German author Christa Wolf, his initial idea was to adapt it as a chamber opera with several roles. However, impressed by the complexity and intensity of the text, he eventually realized that he needed to concentrate on the “utter solitude of a woman awaiting death”, and that it would be “absurd” to make her sing about it. The result is a monodrama that can be seen as an “opera without singers”, thereby dispensing with the last hallowed convention of the genre. For Cassandra only the past remains: “There is no longer any reason to sing.” Jarrell’s music evokes a sense of entangled timelines with its range of tonal colours and rhythmic patterns. Through his use of self-quotation and allusions to works by composers such as Schoenberg, Bartók, Berio and Kurtág, Jarrell creates a densely woven fabric of old and new, against which Cassandra’s final reminiscences well up with haunting intensity. Bas Wiegers conducts Ensemble Modern; Dagmar Manzel narrates. The concert performance of the monodrama for narrator and instrumental ensemble with electronics takes place at the Main Auditorium of the Mozarteum Foundation on 23 July.