Lotofagos, Beat Furrer. Hélène Fauchère & Uli Fussenegger

Описание: Lotofagos for double bass ( Uli Fussenegger) and soprano (Hélène Fauchère), from the opera Wüstenbuch of Beat Furrer (scene X), staged by Christophe Marthaler, Klangforum Wien, Theater Basel on 2010. José Angel Valente.

Lotófagos, or “Lotus eaters,” takes its text from a prose-poem by the Spanish poet José Ángel Valente. Its title refers to the mythological island of lotus eaters. When Odysseus’s men landed there, they ate the lotus plant and forgot about their home, wanting only to stay on the island. Valente’s text expands on this theme of forgetfulness, only at the end invoking its opposite, memory, with the question, “A mild yet warm wind comes from the south. Is this memory?” Furrer’s setting opens with the soprano and bass singing in identical registers, blurring the distinction between instrument and voice, and the first word emerges only slowly, as though the protagonists are struggling even to remember how to speak. This sense of a struggle to speak pervades much of the piece reflects the composer’s sphere of imagination where memory, and its many psychological aspects, ceases to exist and what follows is a state of amnesia.

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