Der Sieg über die Sonne

Novoflot, Berlin, Germany

At its debut performance exactly 100 years ago the opera Victory over the Sun by the Russian artists’ collective Aleksei Kruchonykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Matyushin and Kasimir Malevich was seen as scandalous. In its structure the opera is not only totally a-logical but it also breaks with the rules of conventional communication between performers and the audience. The opera exists as a fragment. On the 100th anniversary of its premiere in St. Petersburg held in the fall of 1913 Novoflot now wishes, jointly with a team of composers and artists, to reconstruct the opera by extending the existing fragments and re-setting the existing libretto to music. The utopian structure of the subject will be dissected afresh, not least with the aim of creating a new genre: exhibition opera. Correspondingly, the audience will not sit down for the performance but will follow a course through different venues.

Forming the focus of the exhibition opera will be original compositions. The supplementary new compositions will relate to the original both in structural and musical terms – however not in terms of aesthetic similarity. Much more the aim here is to allow the relevant signature style of the contemporary composer to emerge. Instead of completing the composition of the opera 100 years on, Novoflot wants to follow on from the thought processes, picking up once again on the idea of futurism. 

October 1 – 20, 2013
Hamburg and Berlin, Germany 

Further Information:
www.novoflot.de