Event

Ekkehard Windrich | Vocalensemble rehearsal director

Sarah Aristidou | Georg Nigl

"Sprich zu mir! Ich schaue dich an, o meine Sonne, und ich erkenne dich nicht."
("Speak to me! I look at you, o my sun, and I do not recognize you.")

Pascal Dusapin simply called the two solo roles in his opera Passion “Lei” and “Lui" – "She" and "He", yet the figures of Orpheus and Eurydice shimmer through them like a distant memory.

Questions that occupied the composer while conceiving his sixth work of musical theater – such as whether Orpheus consciously looks back for Eurydice upon returning from the underworld, realizing how much her disappearance and his pain over the loss inspire him as an artist – were reflected in significant alterations to the myth: In Dusapin’s version, unlike Eurydice, the woman is not sacrificed, for she refuses to follow the man; nor will he return to the world of the living.

Premiered in 2008, the opera unfolds as a dialogue between a couple, oscillating between reconciliation and estrangement. Dusapin titled each of the ten sections – which flow seamlessly into one another – as well as the work as a whole, “Passion.” For a long time, he had been toying with the idea of a project whose central theme would be the musical expression of „Passionen“,von „Leidenschaften der Seele“ (“passions,” of “passions of the soul”). When he received a commission from the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2005 for a stage work that would engage with Claudio Monteverdi’s three surviving operas, it immediately occurred to him how immensely significant the expression of emotions and feelings had been for this pioneer of opera. He therefore decided to combine the commission with his “Passions” project.

And so Lei and Lui find themselves in a continuous flow of shifting states of mind: “The passions,” says Dusapin, “overlap, collide, and branch out into a multitude of paths marked by fear, joy, pain, terror, desire, delight, sorrow, love, and rage.” In his score, Dusapin subtly references Monteverdi and the Baroque era, yet creates a sound world all his own: music of quiet, suspenseful intensity, hypnotic power, and austere beauty.

Text: Christian Arseni

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