Codeword: Mother Helvetia

"Music is not a thing but an activity, something that people do." This is how the American musicologist and composer Christopher Small explained the meaning of his neologism Musicking 25 years ago. This community-building dimension of music is at the heart of the Opera mediatrix research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. It deals with contemporary music theater in Switzerland. 

Emphasis on the collective

The combination of musicking with stories and scenic representation predestines the genre of music theater for the aesthetic encoding of we-identities. A comparison of concise local productions therefore seems particularly suitable for working out country-specific characteristics with regard to the relationship between music theater and collective identity formation. And indeed, the project team from Bern University of the Arts, consisting of Leo Dick, Katelyn King and Noémie Favennec, has been able to identify some constant patterns in the history of the genre here.

Contrary to the dramaturgical conventions of classical opera, Swiss music theater in the 20th and 21st centuries does not focus on the acting individual, but rather on the - usually passively suffering - collective. The genre is thus fundamentally in line with similar tendencies in neighboring artistic disciplines. However, while a critical tradition of relentless analysis of failed collective action has become established in Swiss literature and the visual arts, for example, music theater (as well as Swiss film) still tends to implicitly idealize a "united nation of brothers" (and sisters). In this way, the genre subliminally participates in the construction of a harmonizing self-image of Switzerland, which has been propagated by a political elite under the label of Helvetia mediatrix since the beginning of the 20th century. This also applies to pieces by progressive music theater makers who are unsuspicious of any reactionary Swissness.

Music-theatrical mother-child symbioses

Whether in the musical theater of Christoph Marthaler or Thom Luz, whether in chamber operas by Mela Meierhans or Helena Winkelman: the singing and musical collective is always sent on a symbolic search for a lost mother-child symbiosis in the local repertoire. 

Schiller's future-oriented pathos of freedom in the Rütli Oath is replaced by restrained, melancholy retrospection and a longing for the past. The finale of Xavier Dayer's Alzheim, for example, in which a group of dementia patients remember the Wehrliknaben's song from their own childhood shortly before they mentally fade away, is emblematic of this. In contrast to the country's epic and dramatic literature, such as Jeremias Gotthelf's The Black Spider or Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit of the Old Lady, the punishing or cruel mother hardly ever enters the Swiss musical theater stage. Within the genre, the metaphorical field is largely left to the evocation of the ideal image of a protective and nurturing mother (Helvetia).

Art research at the interface between cultural and political education

On the one hand, the research project is to be understood as a contribution to historiography in a field of repertoire that is still neglected by musicology. On the other hand, the research team also aims to carry out educational work in the transitional area between cultural, aesthetic and political education. Publications of comparative play analyses, for example in the anthology Musicking Collective, which will soon be published by Argus, aim to impart narrative competence. In this case, this refers to knowledge about the ways in which political narratives are overtly or covertly inscribed in (music-theatrical) works of art. Ideally, this results in a sensitization to the manipulative mechanisms of political storytelling in artistic packaging. After all, like any form of theater, music theater is made for a playful examination of society and questions of identity and meaning.