Wasser (2011)
(Musiktheater in 13 scenes)

The story of a trauma forms the background of the thirteen scenes. A man wakes up during a nightmare in a hotel room. He has lost his orientation, which aids one’s memory. That evening in the lobby of the building he stumbles into an event. He thinks he must know the people, but his memory deserts him. Everything appears to be bizarrely off-kilter and deranged, even the music. The music comes from a record that isn’t spinning in precise circle, which gives the atmosphere a distorted and warped flair. He also thinks he has seen the woman who accepts his request for a dance somewhere before, but he doesn’t recognize her. Is she his departed wife/lover appearing before his eyes, or is she another woman who could help him overcome his trauma? They see one another often, and although they try they don’t succeed in getting close to one another; their relationship becomes increasing distant, and in the end they cannot salvage their relationship. (Orpheus also could not bring Eurydice back again).

Arnulf Herrmann did not set a finished libretto to music; his music and Nico Bleutge’s poetry were developed during a process of mutual stimulation. The composer gave every scene its own individual sound, its own individual text-music relationship, its own individual structure and shape. Three of the scenes appear several times, but not as repetitions, but rather as displaced, decentralized similarities, more or less in a state of suspension between identity and difference. Some of the scenes musically follow the principle of rotation, like the characteristics of thought sequences when searching one’s memory. Other scenes develop in a certain direction. At times echoes of brief thematic sections organize the relationship between the singing voices and the instruments. (In the myth of Echo and Narcissus, the nymph can only repeat the last syllables spoken by others. In a mechanical repetition, language loses its communicative function, and a person loses the association with life.) In the end, context and identiy dissolve. This is represented by the metaphor of water, which holds many things, forebodes many things, but does not reveal anything.