Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer

The stage works Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer, La Cubana and We come to the River were composed during the late 1960s and early 1970s in collaboration with Gastón Salvatore, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Edward Bond. Like Henze’s vocal compositions during this phase, these works are an expression of the composer’s intensive and highly critical study of the concepts of the student protest movements of this period and provide him with the opportunity to discover new forms of artistic and dramatic expression allowing him to fuse the political statements of his compositions with his musical aesthetics. The author of the text, Gastón Salvatore, wrote the following on the 11-part poem cycle forming the basis for the “show for 17 performers”, Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer, in 1971: “Natascha Ungeheuer” is the siren of a false utopia. She lulls the leftist bourgeois into a false sense of security which would allow him to retain his “good” revolutionary conscience without actively participating in class warfare. He labours under the temptation to relinquish his consciousness and return to the old bourgeoisie or to choose one of two possible forms of helplessness: either the lonely avant-garde within his own four walls or social democracy. Natascha Ungeheuer offers both possibilities. The difficult path unfolds itself in eleven sectors in a difficult language tainted by a certain degree of foreignness and betraying the vocabulary of the university, the specialist vocabulary of the academic leftists, with which he is surrounded.”

 "I spent the autumn and winter of 1970/71 rather aimlessly travelling around, conducting and writing a piece of platform theatre, Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer, a ‘show for seventeen performers’ (to give it its subtitle) to words by Gastón Salvatore. […] Natascha Ungeheuer is not intended to be the Berlin artist of the same name. Or perhaps she is. At all events, I did not know her at that time (later I bought a number of her paintings), and Gastón, too, had yet to meet her when he used her name. He knew only that an invitation to visit Natascha Ungeheuer in Kreuzberg was somehow ‘in’ among left-wing students of the time and seen as something of a privilege. Our own piece is a kind of latter-day ‘Berliner Requiem’ and is about a young man who sets off for Kreuzberg in search of Natascha Ungeheuer and her eponymous apartment, a sphinx who may be induced to tell people what is to happen to them. Or perhaps she is Utopia personified. Our hero does not reach his destination: but, although he does not find the place, he hears in his head the sirenlike voice of Comrade Natascha, who, far from welcoming and accommodating, reels off a list of objections to him. Attempts to renew his bourgeois connections prove a failure. It is a lonely show that our hero stages."