Minotaurus – Composition Commission issued to Markus Hechtle

ECLAT Festival for new music, Stuttgart, Germany

2013 will see the holding of the 30^th edition of the Festival neue Musik ECLAT under the direction of Hans-Peter Jahn. At the same time, it will be the last edition with him as artistic director. He was someone who always placed experimental music theater in different – precarious, fragmented and original – forms at the focus of the festival. Marking the end of this long and impressive series is the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation’s supported project which had been planned as a premiere at ECLAT for many years now.

In numerous encounters composer Markus Hechtle and director Thierry Bruehl have developed a concept that turns Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s ballad into music theater as a blend of music and language, sound and theater. Markus Hechtle has worked for many years to give this parable a musical form without shortening the text or manipulating its composition in any way.

The idea here is not to set the work to music but to exploit a space where the ambiguity of the ballad takes on compositional form. At the same time, this space is a theater stage 

– a place where the narrator lives through different stages of wandering and orientation: “...because every attempt to get a grip on the world we live in, to shape it, constitutes an attempt to create a counter world in which the world you wish to shape itself becomes entangled” (Dürrenmatt).

The vast theater space becomes a symbolic labyrinth. This labyrinth features here centerstage with the musicians of the Ensemble Modern playing behind it. After the Stuttgart premiere subsequent events are planned in Frankfurt and at the RuhrTriennale in 2013. 

February 8^th 2013 
Theaterhaus Stuttgart

Further Information:
www.eclat.org