Commission to Rebecca Saunders

Rebecca Saunders is one of the most important composers of her generation and her music has a strong music-theatrical quality: in her use of the voice, in her work with space as a compositional parameter, and also through the expressive power of her music and the gestural, almost haptic quality of her sound language. After a whole series of installation-based and interdisciplinary works, she is now writing her first full-length music theatre work for the grand opera stage of the Deutsche Oper Berlin: LASH. Her artistic partner on this project is British video artist and writer Ed Atkins. They have been working together for several years now; among other works, Atkins wrote the text for Saunders’ Scar (2018/19) and the piece titled with Us Dead Talk Love (2021) for alto, saxophone, electric guitar, drums and synthesiser.

A woman finds herself in a state of limbo following a death. She talks about her fantasies and memories of love and loss, sex, illness, eyeballs, genitals, fingertips, lips and eyelashes – in search of meaning and comfort, in an attempt to stop death in its futility. Through the direct experience of her own body and her own mortality, she discovers loss as a prerequisite for experiencing the world – and for loving.

Ed Atkins formulates images of enormous suggestive power. He writes about the body, about the flesh, about mortality and love, creating moments of seductive sensuality and intimate closeness that can, however, in the next moment turn into vertigo in the face of opening abysses. In the opera, the lyrical self splits into four female figures who encounter each other in a kind of limbo between life and death, and it remains unclear whether they are four different individuals or four different aspects of a single female figure. They can be seen conversing with each other in various constellations. In these, they try to explore their own identity and their own physicality, including the lines of fracture and contradictions inscribed in them and breaking out again here, by questioning each other. They attempt to (re-)construct their own ego and in doing so also act out their (inner) conflicts for the stage – ultimately to find their way back to themselves in a process that remains open as to whether it is the retrospective of a dying woman or a new formation for a return to life.

The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation has made the commission to Rebecca Saunders for the LASH music theatre possible.

Further information:
deutscheoperberlin.de

Dates

June 20 & 27, 2025
July 1, 11 & 18, 2025
Deutsche Oper Berlin