Chamber Opera
Vaudeville for Leontine
Based on a text by Prolitheus Pfenninger
libretto Thomas Fortmann
Kaspar Zehnder (musical director)
Stefanie Szanto (mezzo-soprano)
Hans-Jürg Rickenbacher (tenor)
Wolf Latzel (baritone)
Anna Drescher (stage direction)
Christian Beck (scenery)
Christophe Gorgé (light)
Ensemble Paul Klee:
Kaspar Zehnder (flute), Barnabás Völgyesi (clarinet)
Philippe Talec (violin) Matthias Schranz (violoncello)
Ivan Nestic (double bass) Daniel Brylewski (piano)
Christoph Vogt (percussion)
Trailer of the semiscenic 1st performance
on the Festival of Murten Classics
Story
One evening on his way home, Prolitheus Pfenninger finds a book on the seat in the train. It is the worst book he has ever come across. While still on the train, he begins to improve it with a felt-tip pen and Tippex: he crosses out entire blocks of text and leaves only individual words or parts of sentences. Over the next 20 months, he refines his décollage technique. Instead of disgust, he uses poetry as a mental overstructure. Each page individually becomes an object of study in its own right. The original text offers various, yet limited possibilities due to the given choice of words. So he works on a page sometimes for days until it has a completely new face. In the end, the originally told story is stripped away and the pages he treats look like bastards between constructive painting and total arbitrariness. That's how I first saw the book.
The libretto is a collage which I put together from the verbal leftovers that Prolitheus left on the pages of the book. I collected this leftover material in 10 thematic folders and then reassembled everything. The libretto is therefore a collage of a décollage. I limited my own additions to the lyrics. That's how the plot came about, that's how the text was composed.
Music
My musical concept for the piece could be described as "unity in diversity".
In fact, very different currents of contemporary musical styles come together. By trying to give the individual titles the form and style appropriate to their content, I rely on my own and free compositional decision. So the music lies between all the fronts, or rather plays and flirts with them, by mixing compositional techniques of the newer serious music with the rhythmic feeling of jazz and the attitude to life of the rock age. The result is by no means a kind of crossover, but always an original expression of contemporary musical consciousness: a "Sturm und Drang" piece, with the corresponding intention of transcending an enlightened period of musical creation.
As a preliminary study, I wrote a 6-movement suite for piano trio „Prolitheus Suite“ which was premiered at the University of Texas, with repeat performances at Moores Opera, Houston, as well as at two Italian festivals and Carnegie Hall in New York.
Furthermore: despite my tendency towards "twelve-tone", and although my musical expression is different nowadays, I feel connected to the specifically German music theatre, which, through Eisler and Weill, among others, has understood that art and „Gassenhauer“ need not be mutually exclusive. And so I would like to see my Vaudeville for Leontine as a modern continuation of this tradition.
