K(l)eine Morgenstern-Szene

The opera takes its subject from Christian Morgenstern’s ‘Egon and Emilie’ of 1907, which depicts the theatre as a distorting mirror of life: Emilie needs a person to talk to, but because she does not find one she has ‘to leave this stage and go into the nameless nothingness, having neither played nor lived’. The void of a failed artistic existence is revealed behind the theatre’s comedy.
Ninety years on, Widmann’s K(l)eine Morgenstern-Szene (1997) brilliantly translates the play’s anguish into operatic terms. The lead soprano feels unable to find her onstage identity as Emilie: she needs the person facing her to utter a word, just one word. It doesn’t even have to be the word ‘love’—any word breaking the silence would do. In order for this to happen, the trained singer uses every possible technique she ever learnt and exploits her repertoire with enormous creativity: “operetta-like”, “uptight”, “whining”, “oriental”, “ugly”, “in an official tone”, “in dialect”: she sings, roars, talks and whispers. The musicians accompany her by exploring a wide range of different ways of playing. As the tension builds, more and more percussion enter the fray. But all of this is to no avail: Emilie can’t find her role and the performance turns into a rehearsal for which no resolution is possible.