The Isar river and especially this walk along the Auer Mühlbach and over the Kabelsteg have accompanied and shaped my whole life. Just as the water flows down the Isar - sometimes a little, sometimes a lot - life goes its way. Moments connect with the Isar, every new walk brings back memories of the past. I wanted to make this process tangible in a poetic way.
Hans Schnier's relationship with his girlfriend Marie is a thing of the past. But he can't let her go. Again and again he is haunted by nightmarish pictures and figures from his former life. It rages in him and he rages along. From the inner emigration he defends his standards of value against the German restoration society. Staging by Thomas Jonigk at the Schauspiel Köln.
Worthless. Placeless. Katharina has lost everything: the lover, the job, the apartment. In her fight against oblivion she develops extreme, hateful energies. The bustle on Münchner Freiheit serves as a stage for a fictional character who is about to exceed the normative limits of social behavior once and for all.
The audience sits in the pharmacy and looks through the shop windows onto Pasing Station Square. Viola, an apparently sad and disoriented woman, appears on the scene. She seems to be in shock, having lost touch with time and space: "Is that inside or outside now? Is it still yesterday today?"
A plea for opera being practised as political expression: a lecture on the creation of HAPPY HAPPY, an operatic song-cycle with party by Mathis Nitschke
In my operas JETZT and HAPPY HAPPY I composed myself into the opera as a sound director, following a few basic thoughts on the subject of classical singing:
For the album of Stoner Rock Band Colour Haze "To the highest gods we know" I created wind and string arrangements which we recorded, among others, with the Modern String Quartett, fully analog on 24 track 2" tape.
There is no alternative. The public debate is under the seal of fatalism. There is no other objective than that of universal restrictions. Happy Happy brings together, in a sort of cabinet of wonders, impressions, quotations and scenes to become the plea for autonomy and co-humanity. The opera, written for a singer and a chorus, explores, in so doing, the connection between individual and crowd. It turns out that the person's singing gets lost in the hot-tempered aspiration of the multitude at the celebration. And life goes on. Happy Happy. (Commissioned by the National Opera Montpellier)
Watch here what a good example of what tailor-made music can do for an image film.
Live sound design for concerts of the Musica Viva series of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunk, e.g. on 6 February 2014 with Helmut Lachenmann and Peter Eötvös in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz Munich.
