Oper

There are now three operas that the Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud and the German poet Durs Grünbein have collaborated on: a continuing partnership that has produced its own unique working method. This volume presents the three texts that have been created so far. Just as operas are realized in the synthesis of music and language, the profoundly virtuosic librettos by Durs Grünbein deserve their own attention. The first opera, Berenice (2004), based on Edgar Allan Poe, is both uncanny and grotesque: the spirit of the opera itself appears as a vamp in the form of a meta-opera. Then there is the multi-act dizzy spell, Die Antilope (2014), a chamber musical play about an employee of a start-up. Tired of society and his peers, he sings in a strange gibberish of Esperanto and "Antilope," a sound language made up of fragments of meaning.