Kassandra rehearsal. With chorus master Hagen Enke.
I’m currently in Bielefeld in the final rehearsals for Kassandra after Christa Wolf. The world premiere is on Saturday, 21 February at Theater Bielefeld.
Info & Tickets: https://www.buo-bielefeld.de/theater/veranstaltung/kassandra
I want to share how this project came into being — because for me it is an exemplary case of how music theatre can be made differently: less as a finished work one simply “delivers”, and more as something that genuinely develops through collaboration.
Opera: the supreme discipline — and a foreign body at the same time
Over the course of my career I’ve had the chance to work several times with orchestra and choir: film music around 2008, and then the two large one-act operas Jetzt and Happy Happy at the Opéra National de Montpellier (2012/2014) — orchestra, choir, soloists, the full apparatus.
When a hundred, two hundred people suddenly work together in one space, and the core of that huge machine is a score from your own hand, it’s a hard-to-describe, almost overwhelming feeling. And it doesn’t really let go of you.
At the same time, I was never a “born opera person”. For a long time I had little connection to classical singing — and even less to the opera system: its subjects, its rituals, its often astonishing reactionary inertia.
I only truly understood this genre through making it — and only then experienced the disappointments that others have been describing for decades: how the exciting things briefly flare up, only to be swallowed again by institutional conservatism.
In early 2024 I had the chance to articulate this tension in a lecture at the FIMT (Music Theatre Institute Bayreuth):
“New Musical Experiences Through New Technologies — or: What Is Opera, Actually? A Search.”
The text has since been published in a volume from that lecture series: ACT: Opera and Co. for the Future!?
https://ojs.uni-bayreuth.de/index.php/act/issue/view/58
Summer 2024. Holiday in Venice. St. Mark’s Square. I’m in a completely private moment — and suddenly the director Nadja Loschky calls me, introduced by the dramaturg Yvonne Gebauer.
Nadja tells me about her project: Kassandra after the novel by Christa Wolf. A spoken theatre monologue — but conceived across disciplines, with orchestra and choir. From the beginning it was planned around the actress Christina Huckle.
The original plan was to work with existing music from the classical canon. My role would have been to connect these pieces: transitions, sound design, links — so that the evening would feel coherent.
I didn’t find that uninteresting. But I said fairly quickly: if I’m part of this, I would rather compose the evening through.
And that’s how this project began.
***
It took time before it was truly “on the road”, financially and organisationally. The theatre applied for funding — and received it — from the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Fonds für Musiktheater. Many thanks for that.
When it finally became concrete, I actually had no time. CORPUS (my AI music project) was already fully in motion, and I was honestly unsure how to do this with the intensity it would require.
And this is exactly where the real core of this work lies: I did not make the music alone. Quite the opposite.
Selfie with conductor Anne Hinrichsen in front of Theater Bielefeld
I’ve been working closely with Jörg Hüttner for years. It’s a very tight collaboration — originally rooted in synthesiser programming, but long since fully compositional. With MAYA (2017) this way of working began: material is generated together, and I shape it into a composition that is curated rather than “written from a single hand”.
And it goes even further back: one of the first pieces that emerged like this was a work with the cellist Mathis Mayr, almost 30 years ago. The fact that Mathis is now also part of Kassandra is not a coincidence to me.
***
When the question came up — how do we do this with orchestra and choir? — there was a connection that had been there for a long time: Stefan Behrisch. For years there had been a mutual curiosity. We had been circling the idea of working together. This time, it fit.
We had many preliminary conversations, conceptual discussions — and based on these, Stefan drafted a catalogue of compositional material before there even was a final text.
The composition is loosely oriented around the modes of Olivier Messiaen — less as a stylistic quotation, more as a structural tool. The music is organised in blocks: large sound fields, clearly distinguishable states, within which density, duration, and energy can be flexibly shifted.
This music then fed directly into our conceptual discussions with the directing team. And out of that process the text version emerged — which in turn allowed me to articulate and shape the material specifically for this evening.
Central motifs are time and standstill: layered, opaque masses of sound; a nervously ticking pulse; a looming acceleration of time into panic; moments of release, emptiness, solitude. The choir is used not only singing, but also whispering and speaking; the orchestra often becomes a breathing sound surface. The music carries the monologue — it does not comment on it, and it does not console. It remains — even where it seems to fall silent — as time made tangible.
***
I’ve accompanied the entire development process from a music-dramaturgical perspective, and I’m still in rehearsals every day. And in the end, I’m also doing what I was originally asked to do: connecting the pieces — sound collages, transitions, frictions, atmospheres that hold the evening together. These sound compositions were again created in close collaboration with Jörg.
And then there is one more ingredient that is decisive for this evening: Mathis Mayr on cello. He is present in the piece as an improvising performer — live on stage. His contribution is not pre-written. It emerged in rehearsals, in direct interplay with Christina.
***
What makes me happy about this project is simple: here, music theatre is a genuinely collaborative process, in a way I usually associate more with spoken theatre. And at the same time it remains music theatre — with all the force that orchestra and choir can have.
If you’re within reach: come. I think it’s worth it.
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