Befreiung

"In 1989 the Frankfurt Alte Oper asked me to write a composition for the “Frankfurter Feste” celebrating the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. I hesitated for a long time because the hackneyed revolutionary vocabulary seemed to render a differentiated historical treatment impossible, particularly at that time (before the end of the GDR, Romania etc.). Every furniture company appropriated it (“The revolution is – Franz!”). I changed my mind when I rediscovered the anti-liberal, polemic tirade from Rainald Goetz’s dramatic trilogy Krieg. I took out the texts of two characters – “Stammheimer” and “Heidegger” – from Scenes Two (Disintegration) and Three (Organization) and tried to give them form by musical means. I do not intend, then, to resolve for the audience the political tension contained in these texts but unleash it for individual confrontation. The piece also opposes theatrical convention which usually treats Rainald Goetz’s rhythmic language merely naturalistically, deeming it necessary to give the characters a personality to provide psychological motives for good and evil, where, in fact, this serves only to protect us from establishing this distinction for ourselves." Heiner Goebbels