Composition Commission issued to Bernhard Lang: Music Theater Hemma and Leonard

Stadttheater Klagenfurt, Austria

With the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Stadttheater Klagenfurt will be issuing a composition commission for a music theater piece to Bernhard Lang. Together with the librettist and director Michael Sturminger, a work will come about that explores both Carinthia’s history and contemporary history against the backdrop of generational conflicts and border experiences: Hemma, a young woman from America, comes to the Austrian region of Carinthia after inheriting a mountain hut from her grandfather. A grandfather she had never known because her father emigrated to the United States in the early 1970s never to return. He, too, is now dead. With no contact to her father’s family Hemma grew up in New York. Once up the mountain a cousin explains everything to her, for she is alone, without electricity. She is fascinated and shocked by the beauty, solitude, harshness and poetry of the place. Her boyfriend Leonard follows her to this mountain hut. He comes from a New York Jewish family and, like Hemma, is named after a saint: his mother loved and worshipped the saintly Leonard Cohen. Gradually, they start exchanging stories about their forebears – Hemma’s grandfather in Carinthia was a Slovenian partisan who had to survive in the forest for days on end without food or drink; her grandmother was the daughter of a Nazi who silently and stolidly returned from Russian imprisonment. Leonard’s grandmother came from Vienna. She had visited the Wörthersee as a child and was a concentration camp survivor; his grandfather was stationed in Europe as a young G.I. All these tales of suffering lead the young couple to ask how people manage to face such adversity. And why their grandparents’ generation had to endure this great suffering? They then start to experiment at the hut to see how long they can go without food or drink, without talking, sleeping, without light? In what situations are they at each other’s mercy? How will this affect their sexual relationship? Will they start torturing each other? Deep rooted fears and nightmares emerge and the two become estranged – why suffer and struggle if it just leads to silence and severity? (Michael Sturminger) 

September–December 2015 
Stadttheater Klagenfurt, Austria

Further Information: 
www.stadttheater-klagenfurt.at