Mushrooms, people, harmonies

Music, hymn-like, if somewhat loose, played by four cellos: we would probably have no problem listening to it in a concert, but in the theater we expect something to go with it, and in Marthaler's even more so, something. But it takes a long time here, several nice long minutes. At some point, the actors sitting around and listening leave - and come straight back in. They sit there again and continue. They stand up expectantly when the cellists (Hyazintha Andrej, Isabel Gehweiler, Nadja Reich, Vanessa Hunt Russell) turn the page. No, it's not over yet! And keep waiting. They are like us, the audience, they are us, listening to Cage. We are being staged here, placed in the scene.

This very long-lasting scene is the center of the evening. For the Musicircus Apartment House 1776created in 1976 to mark the bicentenary of the US Declaration of Independence, John Cage also composed these "44 Harmonies", which seem like lost songs. They consist of fragments, ex- or rather: subtracted from hymns by composers who were no older than twenty in 1776, such as William Billings or Andrew Law. The beauty of the melodies is preserved, but they seem broken, disintegrated, unstable, somehow lost and abandoned. Such subtraction, such forlornness and silence had to appeal to someone like Christoph Marthaler. In the production ±0 (One base camp)he and his ensemble discovered the pieces and planned to continue working with them. In 44 Harmonies from Apartment House 1776 they sound after just over an hour. This is the turning point of the evening. After that, it is different from before. Before that, Marthaler's theater was able to unfold without restraint, so to speak. It is by no means just about Cage, but about "people, harmonies, mushrooms and harmonies", as Ueli Jäggi announces in his introduction. With the return of the Marthaler family to the Schiffbau, where we once experienced a triumphant yet miserable end to the era of the Schauspielhaus, the typical Marthalerisms also return after fifteen years: actors (in addition to Jäggi, Benito Bause, Marc Bodnar, Raphael Clamer, Elisa Plüss, Graham F. Valentine and Susanne-Marie Wrage) roam the stage; Bendix Dethlefssen, the musical director, plays the piano and harmonium. There are bowing rituals, a devilishly contorted tango danced with chairs, a litany of the strangest mushroom names, a song that descends into the bassiest cellar and so on. All this, as usual, in Anna Viebrock's retro setting, half parlor, half parish hall. In between, Bernhard Landau ghosts around as Cage - blue with jeans and jacket, a walking quotation, talking about mushrooms. At the end of the eight and a quarter hour evening, he appears as a gardener with a watering can and waters the music stands.

With its tragicomedy, this is Marthaler at his best. However, it is a little regrettable that Cage's music is no longer featured. Other pieces from a song like A wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs about the performative Water Music up to lectures like Silence would have opened up the aesthetic field further. Instead, Marthaler returns to the familiar pillar saints of Central European music history, to Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Mahler - and Satie. It's just more recognizable - and still incredibly fun and melancholy. Nevertheless, this results in a special interplay. It is as if Marthaler's narrative style is being turned around by Cage's chance operation - and Cage's music filtered through Marthaler's gaze. It is a doubly ordered anarchy.

So before that, we can almost naively and somewhat nostalgically abandon ourselves to the magic of Marthaler's theater. After the (from a theatrical point of view) monotonous dry spell of the Harmonies the evening no longer finds itself, no longer finds its way forward. A certainly skillful, but now once again very protracted, word-shrinking sextet begins. It merely circles to a close, no longer developing the virtuosity of failure that Marthaler is accustomed to. The Bach chorale It is enough expresses it somewhat helplessly. And it ends with Mahler's Adagietto, like a Death in Venicebut not on the beach, but in the sandpit. And that's what I can't quite forgive the production for, this ending with Mahler, whose melody - instead of an anarchic harmony - is still spinning in my head for days ...