Photo: Kirsten Nijhof

 

Composition Commission issued to Gerd Kühr

Oper Leipzig, Germany


With the support of the EvS Music Foundation, Oper Leipzig has commissioned composer Gerd Kühr and librettist Hans-Ulrich Treichel with the composition of an opera. Born in Austria in 1952, Gerd Kühr studied composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg under Josef Friedrich Doppelbauer and in Cologne under Hans Werner Henze as well as conducting under Gerhard Wimberger (Mozarteum) and Sergiu Celibidache. Since 1995 he has been Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the University of Music and Performing Art, Graz. His international breakthrough came with the premiere of the opera Stallerhof (libretto by Franz Xaver Kroetz) at the 1st Munich Biennale in 1988. The author Hans-Ulrich Treichel made a name for himself with works such as Der Verlorene and Tristanakkord. From 1995 to 2018 he taught at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig and wrote librettos for Hans Werner Henze and Detlef Glanert, among others. The staging of the opera will fall to young Czech director Barbora Horakova.

Gerd Kühr and Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s opera is the initiation story of a young man against the backdrop of East and West German history. It is set in the city of Berlin as a transformational space within personal, historical-political and mythological dimensions. Kühr and Treichel tell four love stories, each of which marks one stage in Albert’s life. Paradigmatic for the individual stages – that take us to 1970s West Berlin, to a mythological time on the East-West no-man’s-land of Pfaueninsel, to the West Berlin theater scene before reunification and finally to the years after the fall of communism – are four female figures: Lise, a student of political science, Friederike, a dentistry student, Marie, an actress and Anna, a young woman from East Berlin. The individual stages are also reflected in the formal design: collage, pastoral, myth and contemporary.


May 29, 2021
Oper Leipzig, Germany


Further Information:
oper-leipzig.de