Composition Commission for Musical Theater issued to Johannes Kreidler

Halle Opera House, Germany

The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation is supporting the composition commission issued to Johannes Kreidler for a choir opera at Halle Opera House. Traditionally, the choir at the opera stands for community, for the way this body of musicians made up of many singers experiences power, intensity and surely also a sense of overpowerment. The choir narrates the plot serving as the source of meaning and providing a commentary on the dramatic events. Here the choir is a key figure for understanding how the aesthetics of opera history is permeated by philosophical and social discourse and vice versa.
Kreidler’s musical theater picks up on this choir function and traces its development from the popular masses of antiquity through to the proxy status of an organized state apparatus. The work aims to make it possible to experience topical communal issues such as patriotism through to the bourgeois nuclear family as political instruments of specific stakeholders. Kreidler’s conceptual, often multi-media works have already been presented as part of festivals such as the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the Witten new chamber music festival Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music as well as Ultraschall Berlin. The debut of his latest piece of musical theater is planned for Spring 2018.

April 27, 2018 (Premiere)

Opernhaus Halle

www.buehnen-halle.de/oper