Exberliner, Ausgabe Mä rz 2014
MoerzMusik 2014
Berliner Festspiele
"The n1usicians take
part in the IQ tests"
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By NATHALIE FRANK
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1 10 selections
Jal German-language theatre
rush."' HAU 1, Stresemannstr.
.ernbrjcke
:H 30,19:30
staged poetry: abstract, wordcomposed. Add music, and
1 great soprano singer Ruth
, as always, Fritsch's coarse
ühne, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
Jrg-Piatz
Z,20:30
1nnyValley
the instant of the dissolve. An
te instabillty of cu~ure and idenditional and virtual realities. 11>
l8, Mitte, U-Bhf #emmeisterstr.
ltill deallog w~ identlty and
el Ronen develops a piece
~ers w~ ex-Yugoslavian
, English surtitles on May 15,
Goridlheater
brator of the HAU, cho~­
usual rules and presents a
t herself. May 26, 20:00, HAU2
ions of CHILOREN Of
JOrtrait of a socio-polltlcally
r~~r Prize wlnner by Stephan
rn~·es Theater; and Nurflan
0-21, 19:30, Gorid Theater.
l2014
As part of MaerzMusik, the Berliner Festspiele's
massive celebration of contemporary music, ENNO
POPPE's eccentric opera /Q comes to Berlin.
A Berlin composer distinguished with numerous
prizes, Enno Poppe makes music that combines
strictly organised structures with sensuous, organic sonority. Performing as a pianist and conductor
as weil, he has led the Berlin-based Ensemble Mosaik since it was founded in 1998. J~s his third
collaboration with author Marcel Beyer.
How did you come up with the idea to
make an opera about IQ tests? The starting pointwas the desire to create an opera with
stage designer Anna Viehrock and author Marcel
Beyer. We didn't begin with the theme, but with
possible structures. We wanted to make an opera
where every act is a variation on the act before..
At some point I ·did suggest the IQ theme
because I find it fascinating: what is that? What
is this 'intelligence' that we measure with I Q
tests? The concept of a number, resulting from
a bizarre mix of various tests, following you for
your whole life and supposedly saying something
about your personality, that's crazy! IQ tests
actually emerged as part of the 19th century's
measurement madness, but what struck me is
that those tests are still very much and uncritically used. They became a cultural technique to
tidy people up in drawers.
So how do you make the IQ testsfit in mosie? The variation of the musical acts becomes
the variatlon of the I Q tests. There are eight
acts presenting eight tests, becoming gradually
· longer and more abstract. The first act and test
lasts only two and a half minutes, then four, then
eight, until the last act, going on for half an hour.
Part of the reason why we decided to work on
IQ testswas because it went weil with this idea
of musical variations. Another factor was because
I wanted the musicians to be on stage as apart
of the play. Of course they are neither actors nor
singers, they can't do everything. But they can
take part in the IQ tests. There is for example a
test where you have to repeat a ton: in this case,
the musicians are tested as musi~ians. Although
I've composed the piece, so they don't really do
the test, they play what I wrote, and we know in
advance who will make the mistake!
And this person gets a bad IQ
result. Weil, there are two key
characters in the play who are not
compatible with the system. There is
this one guy who is basically too intelligent for the test: he finds answers that
were not predicted and then gets bad
results. And then there
is a woman who keeps
getting better results
because she really learns
this culture technique
of I Q tests - as a result
it is not her intelligence
that is being measured
but her capacity to improve her test abilities.
Beginning as a collective
test, the opera gets you
gradually closer to the
different personalities,
showing by their approach to the tests their absurdity.
Do you have a reason for putting your
musicians onstage? I like that! I find it beautiful. And I like the singing voice of musicians.
Opera singers are great, but I can also find them
boring: they have this quite rigid way of singing
that they've learnt and it can be difficult to get
something different from them. Instrumentalists
are musically good enough to sing and create an
interesting variety of sounds. I also work with
a singing actress with a great voice. I cettainly
didn't want to give a main roJe to a musician;
they are always present as a group.
Anna Viehrock did the stage design. Did
her scenography inftuence your music
writing? Yes, we worked tagether from the beginning. When I saw the first model of a scene,
I wrote the music imagining how these people
sitting in this test room with those test tables
would make music within this stage situation.
We decided for instance to hide microphone~
in the furniture, which means that the tables
become musical instruments, able to play many
different tones. We have also many accessories
that we use as musical instruments. For the blues
act, for example, I built a drum set with the copy
machine - that was Anna's idea.
This project is radically interdisciplinary
and collective as oppose to 'just'
composing music. Yes, it's really
IQ March 13.
different, and it's great. But in general
18:00. 14·15,
I always work with people. When I
20:00 I Haus der
'only' write music, I usually write it for
Berliner Festspiele,
musicians that I know. I prefer it that
Schaperstr. 24,
way,
then I can imagine the people, exWilmersdorl, U· Bhf
actly what they do, how they use their
Spichernstr.
instrument. That's also why I don't re-
ally like working with orchestras, because those
8o people are so far away, like a mass. It's not a
pleasure when I don't know them.
Isn't it problematic when your music can
only be played by specific people? Well,
sometimes it can be. For example I did write
the music for ISZ.for a particular opera singer,
we collaborated a Iot on the composition of the
• MaerzMusik:
Berlin's turn
" Berlin is the world's most internat ional musical city," says Matthias
Osterwold, artistic director and curator of MaerzMusik since 2001. This
year, for the first time, he decided
to spatlight Berlin composers. Enno
Pappe agrees with the statement on
the city' s unique position in t he art
world: "What I find fascinating about
Berlin is that everyone binds t he
past with something negative: Prussians, Nazis, the GDR ... That makes
a great difference between Berlin
and Paris or Vienna, where people
tend to define their city with it s good
old times. ln Berlin we need to do
something new and different, and
that is a great energy for the arts."
This energy is brightly presented
in works from adaptive Berliners who came here before 1991,
like Arnold Dreyblatt, Chico Mello
or David Moss; and after: Sirnon
Steen-Andersen, Ondrej Adamek and
Rebecca Saunders, among others.
11> Full
programme at www.berllnerfestspiele.de
music, but then she cancelled two weeks before
the beginning of the rehearsals. I thought it
would be impossible to find another person to
sing that, but then we found another singer and
she's doing it fantastically, very differently but
it's great. So I think that's more something that
I need for the writing process, to imagine the
artist performing, but then another artist can
possibly take the roJe. •
• Bob Wilson's Einstein
Einstein on the Beach
created a revolution in
the t heatre world l!POn its
1976 premiere. A total art
piece, an abstract opera, it
offers a fascinating ftow of
images, poems, dance and
movements, following no
narrative but the hypnotic
music of Philip Glass and
t he abstract evocation of
Einstein's impact on the
world. A 19ttrcentury train entering the stage opens the
show, as one vision among many: a trial, a giant bed,
a prison, a huge tower, an illuminated spaceship ... and
Einstein playing violin. " lt's a work where you go and get
lost . You don 't have to understand anything," says director
Bob Wilson. The current revival, started in 2012, is only
the third since 1976; a sense of " now or never" therefore
accompanies the Berlin showing of this legendary work,
which hasn't lost an inch of its fascinating drive and
hypnotic power. For more of Wilson's work, check out his
magnificent version of the Threepenny Opera in March, or
Peter Pan (with CocoRosie's music) in April, bothat the
Berliner Ensemble.
ON THE BEACH March 3, 5-7, 18:30 J Haus der Berliner
Festspiele, Schaperstr. 24, Wilmersdorf, U-Bhf Spichernstr.
11> EINSTEIN