To you, who never knew me

Who is writing? The sound of a pencil on paper! Aha, literariness - or letters! Perhaps even hidden micrograms. Not for the first time in music theater. Which colleague once promised to write an essay on letter writing in opera? Because this is a delicate moment in the dramaturgy of time: either it happens unrealistically quickly or it stops the flow of time. Not in this case, of course, because the writing becomes the supporting element of the whole. It is not the poet who, as we see, has settled down on a bench with his notebook. It is a woman we hear writing, absent for the poet, present for us in a triune form. She prays to him from afar and writes him this letter, which Letter from a strangeras the novella by Stefan Zweig is called.

Claus Spahn, the chief dramaturge of the Zurich Opera, has condensed this text into a short, almost laconic libretto; Xavier Dayer, who comes from Geneva and is now a composition teacher at the Bern University of the Arts, composed the music - in parallel with a second chamber opera, incidentally, which deals with memory and forgetting in a completely different way: Alzheim was premiered on the same weekend by Konzert Theater Bern. These are chamber operas no. 6 and 7 in Dayer's oeuvre. Although he can certainly imagine writing something for the big stage one day, he says in the MAG of the opera house, it is the inner, ethereal worlds that interest him. "I want to take a look at the inner lives of characters."

He succeeds here in an impressive way: The adored poet (Cody Quattlebaum) is really just a catalyst and gains little character himself. The figure of the "unknown", however, is so rich and varied that it is divided between three singers (Soyoung Lee, Haminda Kristoffersen, Kismara Pessatti); they are so different in voice and appearance that they can represent the three ages of the girl, the young woman and the mother who is ready to die. The unknown woman met the poet when she was thirteen, later had a night and therefore a child with him, which he never knew about, and will eventually die after the death of her son. But she still writes this letter in which she tells the poet everything.
 

So pencil noises at the beginning, delicate piano and percussion sounds. "To you, who never knew me" begins the third female voice. The others join in; the breathing becomes clear. Only with the movement "In mir wuchs der Traum von Dir" does one voice take off - and the ensemble sound, this distant music, begins to blossom. The triple stranger moves between speaking and singing. She follows her dreams, her encounters, and we never know for sure whether she is just longing for and fantasizing about everything or whether she is experiencing any of it. It remains secondary, because it is all about the inner life of this woman. Instead, Dayer develops an incredibly subtle tonal language, precise in the instrumental sextet (the Ensemble Opera Nova under Michael Richter in the Pierrot instrumentation plus percussion that has long since become standard), very cantabile in the singing (yes, Dayer can write for voices), melodious and expressive, sometimes in a madrigalesque polyphony. This helps us to immerse ourselves in the person. The texts are so succinct that they almost only hint. Dayer expands them again through repetitions and variations, in a spiral and, in the best moments, in a way that is as good as a jugular. The unknown drifts into her inner self, as it were. Barbara Pfyffer's set design shows a kind of rollercoaster on which the emotions whirl. Nina Russi has staged the play very discreetly and unspectacularly.

This is how The dream of you through the almost seventy minutes, quite intense, even if it ultimately doesn't take off enough into the dreamlike or descends into its abysses. At that point, when the dry ice streams onto the studio stage and everything could become even more unreal, the lyrics and vocals remain stuck on the accusations against the beloved from afar. At this point, the emotional dramaturgy of the play also comes to a halt, it doesn't get any further. The "I, I, I" stammering at the end, the insistence on a repeated tone are more assertions of a psychological brokenness than they would take us another level deeper. Of course, anyone who wants to may also interpret this as the hopelessness of a person lost in himself ...

PS: World premiere of The dream of you was on December 2 on the studio stage of Zurich Opera House. There were only four performances in total until December 9. Zurich Opera has commissioned further chamber operas for the Opera Nova ensemble.