zang en performance Daniela Bernoulli, Romy Roelofsen e.a. / Regie Gable Roelofsen
In Erwartung herinnert een verwarde, naamloze vrouw zich flarden van een traumatische gebeurtenis uit het verleden. Met een angstig voorgevoel doolt ze door een bos. Daar treft ze uiteindelijk haar geliefde dood aan. De atonale, dissonante muziek van Arnold Schönberg weerspiegelt op een treffende manier de verwarde staat van dit personage. Voor het libretto van deze eenakter heeft Marie Pappenheim zich laten inspireren door Studies over hysterie van Joseph Breuer en Sigmund Freud.
Deze voorstelling maakt deel uit van de serie 'Fremdkörper': een serie theatrale onderzoeken naar hoe wij omgaan met het vreemde in onszelf en het vreemde in de ander.
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Recensie
Schoenberg’s ‘Erwartung’ by “Het Geluid” is an amazing performance in an amazing and very convincing theatrical setting.
The audience is invited to attend a court case in a real Court of Law in the centre of Maastricht. In it proceedings are presided over by a real judge who looks compassionate throughout, inviting us to feel the same way towards this woman who is standing there. As a witness? As a suspect? She may have just been brought in as a witness, but her behaviour turns her into a suspect, because if anything is clear at all in her story it’s this: the woman has lost all sense of reality. The title is very poignant: it is apprehension which makes us believe reality will live up to our expectations, and this belief based on apprehension is so strong that we still expect it to be true, though reality itself tells a completely different story. It is this type of apprehension which lies at the core of both madness and crime, thus making the only difference between the two that in madness the apprehensive person him/herself is the sole victim. Schoenberg’s score gives a minute account of this madness, which results in a vocal part fraught with difficulties in about every bar. Metre and tempo changes incessantly and melodic repetition is utterly nonexistent. Add to this the total duration of half an hour, making it one of the longest arias in operatic history, and here we have a real challenge for any dramatic soprano. Probably out of financial necessity the accompaniment (part piano, part full orchestra plus (?!) other soprano) for singer Daniela Bernoulli was on tape, which makes it very difficult to give the impression of something like natural timing. Not only did Miss Bernoulli give this impression, the impression she gave was of actually feeling every single sudden mood swing, not only in her singing, but in her whole being. Someone from that era had just come down to us, taking us back to Vienna at the end of the 19th century (which ended in 1914: it was a late turn of the century), an epoch and a place where unreal apprehension was kind of expected from society’s leading ladies. I’m convinced Miss Bernoulli let every single emotion and mad thought happen to her at the moment the score required: a feat only the greatest actors are capable of - and this time the great actor came in the unlikely disguise of a fully equipped operatic soprano. The theatrical setting then made this fin de siècle figure very much alive in Maastricht 2008, a time rife with unreal apprehension once again, I feel, making me wonder whether we’ll have a very late turn of the century again. A must see then that too few people actually saw.
zang en performance Daniela Bernoulli, Wim van den Driessche / dramaturgie Lieke van Hoogenhuyze / vormgeving Davy van Gerven /Geluidsontwerp Geert Oddens / Regie Gable Roelofsen / artistiek advies Romy Roelofsen / i.s.m. Theater aan het Vrijthof en Intro in Situ met steun van Gemeente Maastricht.
zang en performance Daniela Bernoulli, Wim van den Driessche / dramaturgie Lieke van Hoogenhuyze / vormgeving Davy van Gerven /Geluidsontwerp Geert Oddens / Regie Gable Roelofsen / artistiek advies Romy Roelofsen / i.s.m. Theater aan het Vrijthof en Intro in Situ met steun van Gemeente Maastricht.