Minicourse Opening @HollandFestival, part 1: Total theatre on slippery communication

Holland Festival

The history of 'Quartett' began in 1782. In that year, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos wrote 'Les liaisons dangereuses'. The way the theme of love and deceit is developed in this decadent intrigue novel hardly fits our times anymore. But the novel has been pulled from under the dust quite often, not only in various film adaptations, but also in literature and theatre. Those revivals are telling of how Western culture developed. Heinrich Mann translated the work and in a foreword emphasised the moral message he felt the book contained. German playwright Heiner Müller rewrote 'Les liaisons dangereuses' into the play 'Quartett'. In it, the story's entanglements are a metaphor for power and manipulation, especially in politics.

With great artistic daring and creativity, the composer Luca Francesconi retells the story. He adapted Müller's text of 'Quartett' and turned it into an opera, using all the means offered by modern times that distinguish him from his predecessors. These are resources within theatre, but he seizes upon them to say something about the situation in which Western man anno now finds himself: man seeking a foothold on the slippery paths of global communication. The result is spectacular. The audience is taken 80 minutes into a total experience in which boundaries become uncertain. Story, set, video projections and spatiality merge with music, which in turn does not stop at the boundaries of the opera genre either, but lets in pop, jazz and world music.

Orchestral musicians turn the sense of space on its head by using the auditorium to its limits. The stage setting is dominated by a cube suspended from a wreath of wires high above the floor. In it, two vocalists interpret a turbulent sea of fears, desires and destructiveness. Video projections extend the immersive images far beyond the hanging cube. Like Müller, Francesconi interprets in it how people manipulate each other, but now in a contemporary way. Everyone is in contact with everyone else. Each time, new means are pumped into the internet to establish those contacts and influence each other, resulting in a boundless uncertainty about what modern people have on each other.