The politics of the polyphony of performance: Musicalization in contemporary German theatre¹

I would like to thank Nita Schechet and Jessica Berson for their patient advice and meticulous corrections. All remaining flaws, however, are mine.

Abstract

The article describes and analyses the ‘musical turn’ German theatre has undergone in the past fifteen to twenty years, consisting in a re-discovery of the musicality of the theatrical process and event, not a mere inclusion of more music into the theatrical performance. The author focuses on three aspects of this phenomenon: firstly, musicalization in the devising or rehearsal process; secondly, musicalization as an organizational principle of performance; and thirdly, musicalization and the perception process. By looking at productions of Ruedi Häusermann, Sebastian Nübling, Heiner Goebbels, Christoph Marthaler and Einar Schleef, the author finds that musicality helps to introduce new dramaturgies and structures to theatrical performance and to challenge the expectations and meaning-making processes of the audience. For the director and performer musicality provides an alternative (not necessarily mutually exclusive) performative task to work with that shifts the attention from working on character, situation and narrative towards aspects of timing, sound and the polyphony of the theatrical media. For the audience, the inclination of a theatrical event towards the self-referentiality of music is a liberation of the obligation to ‘get’ the meaning of everything that happens on stage. And potentially, by worrying less about ‘what it means’, the audience can focus their attention on ‘what it is’ and thus challenge, widen and reflect on their own modes of perception and observation. At the same time, musicalization in the theatre will always deal with concrete spaces, bodies, texts and para-texts; meaning and coherence can thus be reintroduced through the back door by making use of the connotative referential potential of music.

Notes

I would like to thank Nita Schechet and Jessica Berson for their patient advice and meticulous corrections. All remaining flaws, however, are mine.

See for example: Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. by Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 91–93; Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie, ed. by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Doris Kolesch and Matthias Warstat (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005) – entries ‘Musik’ and ‘Rhythmus’; Guido Hiß, ‘Freiräume für die Phantasie! Neue Tendenzen in der Methodendiskussion’, TheaterZeitSchrift, 35 (1993) Theaterwissenschaft morgen?, 19–29; David Roesner, Theater als Musik. Verfahren der Musikalisierung in chorischen Theaterformen bei Christoph Marthaler, Einar Schleef und Robert Wilson (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2003).

Guido Hiß, Synthetische Visionen: Theater als Gesamtkunstwerk von 1800 bis 2000 (München: Epodium, 2005).

Ruedi Häusermann, ‘Dunkelschöpfung ins Licht gerückt’ (Interview with Barbara Tacchini and Beret Evensen), in the programme notes of Gewähltes Profil: lautlos, Staatstheater Hannover. Premiere: 6 May 2006, pp. 1–32 (pp. 7–8). If not otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

The production uses the menu option ‘silent mode’ from mobile phone technology as its title.

Häusermann, ‘Dunkelschöpfung ins Licht gerückt’, p. 14.

Despite having been premiered at the Théâtre Vidy, Lausanne (Switzerland) and being performed in French, Frankfurt-based Heiner Goebbels' work has been presented extensively in Frankfurt and Berlin, hence its inclusion here in the context of contemporary German theatre.

Heiner Goebbels, ‘Text as Landscape. With the Qualities of Libretto, Even if Unsung’, trans. by Heike Roms, Performance Research, 2.1 (1997), 61–65 (p. 65).

Cornelia Jentzsch, ‘Die Songline in Canettis Denken’. http://www.heinergoebbels.com/index2_n.htm, under ‘portraits’[accessed 26 October 2006].

Its subtitle is ‘musée des phrases’.

Quoted in Christian Kaden and Volker Kalisch, ‘Musik’, in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. by Karlheinz Brack (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2005), pp. 256–308 (p. 283).

See photographs of the production by Mario Del Curto and Klaus Gruenberg on http://www.heinergoebbels.com/index2_n.htm, under ‘pictures’, then ‘Eraritjaritjaka’[accessed 21 February 2007].

We only learn later in the performance that the taxi-journey – despite its efforts to come across as a live-feed – must have been produced prior to the performance.

Although there is no photograph of this particular scene on http://www.heinergoebbels.com, the existing photographs of the production by Mario Del Curto and Klaus Gruenberg make it easy to visualize what is being described here.

Elias Canetti in: Heiner Goebbels, Eraritjaritjaka. Musée des Phrases. Based on texts of Elias Canetti. English Textbook from the programme notes (2004).

Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, pp. 184–85, original italics.

Although this essay focuses on musicalization in relation to the audience, it is not my intention to claim or provide evidence for ‘objective’ audience reactions or perceptions; instead I refer to plausible implications and strategies of musicalization and, occasionally, explicitly expressed intentions of its practitioners.

Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 40.

For further discussion of Marthaler's work see for example: Stefanie Carp, ‘Langsames Leben ist lang. Zum Theater von Christoph Marthaler’, Theaterschrift, 12 (1997), 64–77; Guido Hiß, ‘Marthalers Musiktheater’, in Musiktheater als Herausforderung. Interdisziplinäre Facetten von Theater – und Musikwissenschaft, ed. by Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999); Patrick Primavesi, ‘A Theatre of Multiple Voices. Works of Einar Schleef, Christoph Marthaler and René Pollesch’, Performance Research, 8 (2003), 61–73; Franz Wille, ‘Das Marthaler Projekt. Wem die Stunde schlägt’, Theater Heute Jahrbuch, 1996 (Berlin: Friedrich Berlin Verlag, 1996), pp. 70–79.

Detlev Baur, ‘Der Chor auf der Bühne des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in Der Chor im antiken und modernen Drama, ed. by Peter Riemer and Bernhard Zimmermann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999), pp. 227–46 (p. 227).

Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), p. 123.

Heiner Goebbels, ‘Gegen das Gesamtkunstwerk. Zur Differenz der Künste’, in Heiner Goebbels. Komposition als Inszenierung, ed. by Wolfgang Sandner (Berlin: Henschel 2002), pp. 135–41 (p. 135).

Goebbels, ‘Gegen das Gesamtkunstwerk’, p. 136.

See Renate Härtl, ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön. Christoph Marthaler inszeniert Goethes Faust 1 + 2’, TV-Documentary by Renate Härtl for ZDF, 1994.

Andreas Schäfer, ‘Im Untergehen scheint die gute Seite auf – Einar Schleef inszeniert in Düsseldorf Wildes Salome’, Berliner Zeitung, 23 June 1997.

For information on Einar Schleef see, for example: Wolfgang Behrens, Einar Schleef: Werk und Person (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2003); Miriam Dreysse Passos de Carvalho, Szene vor dem Palast: Zur Theatralisierung des Chors bei Einar Schleef (Frankfurt am Main et al: Peter Lang, 1999); Einar Schleef. Arbeitsbuch, ed. by Gabriele Gerecke, Harald Müller and Hans-Ulrich Müller-Schwefe (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002).

Sten Nadolny, The Discovery of Slowness (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2006).

Most narrative music video-clips exemplify this, as do most contemporary cinema thrillers.

For example: Murx (Berlin, 1993), Stunde Null (Hamburg 1995), The Unanswered Question (Basel 1997), Die Spezialisten (Hamburg 1999), 20th Century Blues (Basel 2000), or O.T. (Zurich 2004).

Here the theatre situation provides what Liszt, who introduced the term programme music, characterized as a ‘preface added to a piece of instrumental music, by means of which the composer intends to guard the listener against a wrong poetical interpretation, and to direct his [sic] attention to the poetical idea of the whole or to a particular part of it’, quoted in Roger Scruton, ‘Programme music’, in Grove Music Online, http://www.grovemusic.com, ed. by L. Macy [accessed 14 May 2007].

For a more detailed analysis of this scene see Roesner, Theater als Musik, pp. 80–89.

For a more detailed analysis of this scene see ibid., pp. 215–16.