Radek (2006)
(Chamber Opera in One Act)

With my opera RADEK, based on the text by Thomas Höft, I have attempted to realise ato realise a musico-dramatic approach that I have had in mind for years: A subject that is burning under the nails today, music that does not deny its origins at the beginning of the 21st century and is neither without history nor arbitrary, nevertheless as open as possible in the use of its means, obeys its own laws, and also places itself at the service of the dramatic situations and developments on stage. driving them forward, commenting on them, slowing them down, overturning them, bringing reminiscences and casting shadows ahead. Music that reaches out to the listener and viewers, to achieve resonance and social relevance, to win over the  audience as a partner without offering itself to them; evoking reflection, sadness, but also to evoke enthusiasm and understanding. A work of art that combines all the parameters of music and theatre in an overall dramaturgy and bundles them together on a higher level and and allows them to interact on a higher level.

RADEK represents my reckoning with the atrocious crimes and radically failed utopias of the 20th century, which still have an impact today and without which our present can hardly be understood.

The man Karl Radek was caught up in the maelstrom of his time: his Jewish origin from the k.u.k. monarchy, his involvement in the Russian revolution, his involvement in the horrors of Stalinist totalitarianism, which led to the initially utopian do-gooder and brilliant demagogue supporting the Hitler movement with the help of Stalin and ultimately becoming a victim of the machinery he had helped to build, ultimately being sentenced to prison and deportation to Siberia after betraying his last friends. These are all the markers of a fate that he could not escape. The author and composer let him remember his youth in Galicia; relive the shadows of  Jew-hatred; political agitation; arguing with Rosa Luxemburg Luxemburg; and again and again show his enthusiasm for the revolution (which in the end at the end is only the sad memory of something that could have been, an idea idea that has been completely perverted); describe the origins of his corrupted functionary thinking in the scene of the sealed train; mourn with him for his wife's his failed love for his wife Rose, let him dialogue with Trotsky and the voices of his imagination (all the scenes take place in the prison camp, perhaps they are all imaginary phantasmagorias...), sing the Internationale, and bring back the murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht as the undead, lose his lover Larissa once again to the enthusiasm for the revolution that he had implanted in her heart; discussing with Stalin about supporting the Nazis; singing a Yiddish song with Hitler and Stalin: Lomir ale lusstik sajn, which will turn from surreal nightmare into absolute horror horror (quotations, fragments, counter-music from the Moorsoldatenlied of the concentration camp prisoners of Börgermoor, Schönberg's survivor from Warsaw and from the Lacrimosa of Mozart's Requiem); he will chase an angel who makes him a spiritual offer to the devil; witnessing the assassination of Trotsky in a kind of collective preconsciousness in a nightmarish way, unable to intervene (although it did not even take place during his lifetime); and finally to relive his trial at the end of which he accuses himself and, after the only music that returns returns as a larger unit in the opera (from the beginning, thus closing the circle), in which he sings about the burning cold in the prison camp (which, in contrast to the beginning, is interrupted three times by short fragmented musical quotations from the three spheres of influence that defined his life: the Yiddish song from his youth, the of his youth, the Internationale and the Horst Wessel song): And it wasn't ....umsonst after all.  A statement which, due to the composed pause, is unclear in its meaning, can mean its opposite, remains open. The orchestral postlude at the end of the opera hints at his violent end, his murder at Stalin's behest. 

Again and again, I have taken on the role of the director in composing the music shows how the characters think and feel (even if they say something different or appear to act in a different way than they actually feel), it interprets and comments.

The entire piece is based on uniform basic musical material, which extends the smallest ramifications, also allowing for transitions and transformations. In particular, the harmonies also serve to characterise the piece: the dramatis personae are each assigned their own harmonic world, which, according to the plot, is linked to the world of the dramatis personae, which can interact with the world of the other characters according to the plot.

The harmonic starting point and nucleus for the opera is the RADEK ACCORD: B-D-E-As-Des-Es, a six-part structure that appears again and again at key points. The musical language encompasses harmonic surfaces and fields, clusters (representation of totalitarian grey), centraltonally directed surfaces, free harmony and chordal harmonics and chords derived from the basic material, serial and isorhythmic processes, up to pure triads and tonal layers from the quotations and, above all, the possibility of immediate transitions and changes between all these techniques, and, if the dramatic situation requires it, the use of all conceivable developments, intersections and metamorphoses. A special quotes play a special role in this work: like heterogeneous layers, they are embedded in the world of the characters: the remembered, the reappeared, the foreign. Overlaid are Yiddish songs, the Wacht am Rhein, the Internationale, the Horst Wessel song, the Latino bar music of the Trotsky murder scene are overlaid by the layers of the mother, of Radek, of Stalin, of the voices, of the Carioca girls. The scraps from the Moorsoldatenlied or Schönberg's Survivor or the Mozart Requiem after the grotesque Mozart Requiem after the grotesque Hitler - Stalin - Radek scene have the effect of a micro-counterpoint to the gloom. For an overall depiction of these complex psychological worlds and processes with their phantasmagorias and nodes of actionbetween political agitation, lyrical moments, speechless horror, extreme dramatic developments, surreal nightmares and human catastrophes catastrophes, the compositional technique also had to be a complex one, exploring the totality of the means, but tamed by a will to unity in diversity, with the aim of subordinating all means to a dramaturgical whole. R.D.