Vom Meer – Composition Commission issued to Alexander Muno

Theater Heidelberg, Opernzelt

The libretto to Alexander Muno’s opera Vom Meer (From the Sea) is based on Henrik Ibsen’s marital drama The Lady from the Sea. In Ibsen’s original Ellida, a woman once living on the open sea, chooses to stay with her husband when he says he is prepared to release her for her lover. A decision made of her own free will. It is the sea that symbolizes this endless freedom but also its inherent solitude and longing.

The orchestra in Muno’s opera is also very much a “sea of sounds”. Located on stage – with the singers and actors performing in the stalls and the audience sitting on stands – the orchestra becomes one of the cast. The figures are reflected in the music as they are in the sea. The composition Vom Meer issued with the support of the EvS Music Foundation is the composer’s first opera. Vom Meer completes Theater Heidelberg’s series of intense and systematic explorations of contemporary music and the way it is taught in music education – explorations which have included the annual “Composer for Heidelberg” project since 2005.

 

April 29th 2011 (premiere)

Stadttheater Heidelberg

 

Further Information:

www.theaterheidelberg.de