Cassandra

Schwarzstraße 28

5020 Salzburg

 

Ensemble Modern

After the fall of Troy, Princess Cassandra is abducted by Agamemnon to Mycenae, where certain death awaits her. In a final mental effort, she recalls the past events and feelings, analyses them and interprets them: the abduction of Helena, which triggered the war, her own love for Aeneas and her hatred of "Achilles the Beast", the increasingly authoritarian atmosphere within Troy in the face of external threats and finally the death of her family and the end of her home town. The priestess and seer Cassandra had foreseen the catastrophes, but no one wanted to believe her.

When the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell came across the story Kassandra (1983) by the East German author Christa Wolf, he initially planned to turn it into a chamber opera with several roles. Impressed by the complexity and intensity of the text, however, he came to the conclusion that he had to return to the "utter loneliness of a woman waiting to die" and that it would be "ridiculous" to have her sing. The result is a monodrama that, as an "opera without singing," breaks with the last conventions of the genre. For Kassandra, only the past remains: "There is no reason to sing anymore." The text is interpreted musically, but the composition is never illustrative; rather, the spoken word and music merge into a common whole and permeate each other.

Like Kassandra's fragments of memory, which move back and forth between the joyful past before the war and the later private and political blows of fate, Jarrell's music also conveys several time levels through different timbres and rhythmic structures. Through self-quotations and allusions to works by composers such as Schönberg, Bartók, Berio and Kurtág, Jarrell created a densely woven fabric of old and new, against which Cassandra's futureless retrospective unfolds in a compelling way.

(Source: salzburgerfestspiele.at)