For Deutsche Oper Berlin’s fourth co-production with the Munich Biennale, Austrian composer BERNHARD GANDER sets a libretto by Ukrainian writer SERHIJ ZHADAN to music and develops a new opera in collaboration with director Alize Zandwijk and soloists from Ensemble Modern and Deutsche Oper Berlin.
In their world premiere, Gander and Zhadan deal with the extremely complicated border and friendship lines that run between formerly firmly connected states. Using an exemplary border post situation, Zhadan’s text negotiates the dramatic effects of war, displacement and flight on the human individual. The characters appearing there are confronted with the question of how to decide for a cause when the cultural, historical, political, and individual-biographical circumstances are too complex and contradictory for a “right” decision to succeed at all.
ABOUT THE WORK
- Composer & Musical theatre by Bernhard Gander
- Libretto by Serhiy Zhadan
- Premiere in the Tischlerei of the Deutsche Oper Berlin on 21 May 2022
- In German with English and German subtitles
- Running from May 21-26, 2022
- Co-production of the Munich Biennale with the Deutsche Oper Berlin
- Commissioned by the Munich Biennale and Ensemble Modern
In his libretto for the world premiere of SONGS OF EXILE AND NO RETURN Serhiy Zhadan sketches in vivid language the dramatic effect on the human individual of war, displacement and flight. With the existential challenges posed by Russian-Ukrainian relations as his point of departure, Zhadan uses a blend of choral passages and short dialogues depicting everyday situations to present fictional experiences of flight and forced migration. In this fourth collaboration between the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Munich Biennale Austrian composer Bernhard Gander has set Serhiy Zhadan’s text to music and worked with director Alize Zandwijk and soloists of the Ensemble Modern and Deutsche Oper Berlin to produce an original work of musical theatre.
Bernhard Gander
Bernhard Gander has made his name as a composer of New Music and writes music that straddles genres and defies categorisation. He combines New Music and heavy metal on a number of levels – formal, auditory, gestural and energetic – to create hugely expressive works of great plasticity. Gander’s material has been performed at a wide variety of venues and events that include the Wiener Konzerthaus, the Wiener Festwochen, the steirischer herbst Festival, the Klangspuren Festival, Transart Bozen, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wien modern, Musica Strasbourg, the Wittener Tage for New Chamber Music and the Munich Biennale. He won the City of Vienna’s 2004 Music Composition Grant, the 2005 Erste Bank prize for composition, the 2009 SKE Publicity Prize and a state grant for composition. Bernhard Gander was awarded the Ernst Křenek prize for melting pot, a piece which had its world premiere at the 2012 Wiener Festwochen.
Serhij Zhadan
Serhiy Zhadan, born in 1974 in the province of Luhansk, eastern Ukraine, studied German, wrote his doctoral thesis on Ukrainian futurism and since 1991 has been an influential figure amongst the younger generation in Kharkiv. He is one of the most prominent voices in modern Ukrainian literature. War and dissolution are common themes in a body of work encompassing novels, short stories and over a dozen volumes of poetry. He has portrayed, in moving and haunting images, life in eastern Ukraine and never ceased to remind people that war has been a bitter reality for the Donbas population since 2014. His latest novel, “Internat”, presents war in a series of dense, atmospheric scenes, depicting armed conflict as something that is devoid of useful meaning and yet, precisely for that reason, transforms people’s lives dramatically. In 2014 he was awarded the Jan Michalski literature prize and the Brücke Berlin prize (jointly with Juri Durkot and Sabine Stöhr) for his “The Invention of Jazz in Donbas”, which was voted »Book of the Year« by the BBC. Zhadan lives in Kharkiv and publishes with SUHRKAMP. The libretto, penned by the poet and novelist for the Munich Biennale and the Deutsche Oper Berlin, marks his debut as a writer for the stage. He is also a member of the band Sobaki v kosmosi (Dogs in Space) and has sung at concerts given for soldiers in Ukraine’s disputed territory.