Peter Ruzicka in a double pack
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World premiere of the opera Benjamin at the Staatsoper, orchestral work Elegie at the Forum
He is a professor at the Institute for Cultural and Media Management, holds an honorary doctorate from the university, is the artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival - and is in demand as a composer worldwide. Peter Ruzicka's latest opera Benjamin has now been commissioned by the Hamburg State Opera and will be performed at Dammtorstrasse. The composer himself will be conducting the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra, with Yona Kim, lecturer in stage direction at the HfMT, and Angela Beuerle, lecturer at the Theaterakademie, acting as dramaturge. Accompanying the world premiere, the university's symphony orchestra will perform Peter Ruzicka's orchestral work Elegie in the HfMT Forum on June 11. The conductor will be Ulrich Windfuhr.
Walter Benjamin was a German philosopher and cultural scientist. His life as a Jew and Marxist through the 20th century was unsteady and erratic. The characters who follow Benjamin's final journey in this opera mark out his sphere of influence. Hannah Arendt spoke of the "banality of evil", Benjamin's chess partner Bertolt Brecht polemicized against his "Jewish fascism", the Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem wanted to bring his friend to Israel, Benjamin fantasized about proletarian children's theater with the Latvian actress Asja Lacis. It was not the world revolution, but the "weak messianic force" that showed Benjamin the way to a just society. While fleeing to the USA, Benjamin took his own life in the Spanish border town of Port-Bou in 1940.
And an opera about this Walter Benjamin? "A life is only communicated in the present, only directly, and the rest is conjecture and construction, born of our greed for 'stories'," says librettist and director Yona Kim about her thoughts at the beginning of the libretto for this opera.
opera. "Because," Yona Kim continues, "it is by no means about retelling Walter Benjamin's biography, it is rather the attempt of a music theater that wants to take up the magical pace of his radically border-crossing thinking in its dramaturgy, which does not seek a closed thought building, a home, but is the restless traveling itself."
While the inner structure of this opera libretto is anchored in the movements of Benjamin's thinking, it is given its outer framework by the reference to specific people and events that were decisive for Benjamin's life. Walter Benjamin - here Walter B. - is joined by Dora K. (Kellner), Gershom S. (Sholem), Bertolt B. (Brecht), Asja L. (Lacis) and Hannah A. (Arendt). Like the title character herself, they oscillate between the memory of their real-life role model and their reality as opera characters with specific functions and attributions in relation to the plot. A clearly outlined narrative situation - the end of Benjamin's life - forms the core of the opera: "The starting point for the libretto," reports Yona Kim, "was a scenic idea that was also a scenic question: What is going on in Walter Benjamin when he spends that September night alone in a clearing in the Pyrenees, fleeing from the National Socialists?"
The music that Peter Ruzicka composes for this text draws on this narrative structure and continues it with musical means: "The opera Benjamin was preceded by a purely orchestral work entitled Flucht. There I tried to describe the specific 'tone' that was to determine the later opera score. Benjamin's restless traveling has itself become sound here. One may sense something of the discontinuity of his thinking in the score and also learn about Walter Benjamin, who was afflicted by depression and isolation. The musical gestures appear throughout as a 'journey into the interior'," says Peter Ruzicka. The restlessness of the musical gesture, the diversity of the images conveyed in the sound are framed in a clear structure of music-theatrical narration: a prelude introduces the work and refers in terms of sound and motif to what is to come, which will develop in the following seven "stations" including four orchestral interludes. Through its gestural-atmospheric power, which this music draws from a spectrum from silence to the greatest expressivity, from the highest, percussive-rhythmic movement to standstill, from the most exposed, acrobatic art song to speech, an event unfolds in sound that opens up the epochal dimensions of the life and thought of these figures.
Peter Ruzicka
Benjamin - world premiere
Sunday June 3, 2018 18:00, further performances on June 6, 10, 13 and 16, each at 19:30
Hamburg State Opera
Musical direction: Peter Ruzicka
Production: Yona Kim
Stage: Heike Scheele
Costumes: Falk Bauer
Lighting: Reinhard Traub
Dramaturgy: Angela Beuerle
Peter Ruzicka
Elegy - in orchestral concert
Symphony Orchestra of the HfMT
MONDAY 11.6.2018 19:30
HFMT, FORUM
Peter Ruzicka: Elegy
Franz Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major
Antonin Dvořák: Symphony No. 7 in D minor op. 70
Soloist: Eun-A Kim, concert exam (class of Prof. Anna Vinnitskaya)
Conductor: Ulrich Windfuhr