Program Note

Song for soprano from the musictheatre AGOTA? The Illiterate (Yesterday/Somewhere) based on a libretto by Stefanie Woerdemann

Die Stille stürzt auf die Bäume, auf den fahlen Wald The silence tumbles down the trees, the pale forest gekrümmt bis zur Erde und deinem weißen Gesicht crooked to the earth and your white face müde, irgendwo, denkst du an mich, denjenigen, tired, somewhere you are thinking of me, the one, der es liebte, wie deine Augen sich schlossen von innen, who loved your eyes closing from inside, Kummer begleitet mich seit ich am Leben bin, sorrow is my companion since I was born, in den Bewegungen, in the movements Kaskaden in den Farben von Asche cascades in the colours of ash durch das schmutzige Land, through the dirty land, Dämmerungen bergen ihre Traurigkeit. twilights are hiding their depressions.
Ein Vogel flog, eine Art Vogel, schlecht behandelt, A bird flew, a kind of bird, badly mistreated, die Flügel aus Eis, sie jammerten, its wings of ice, they yammered, er öffnete seine Wunden im Himmel, it opened its wounds in heaven, von Neuem bleib ich vor dem Haus, again I stay before the house wo du mich einst umarmtest. where you once embraced me. Der fahle Wald stützt sich auf seine müden Äste, The pale forest rests upon its tired limbs, ein Wind schwankt ohne Ziel, a wind sways aimlessly, verlorene Tage kommen zu mir, lost days are coming to me, nachlässig und blass wie die Wolken. negligent and palid as the clouds.
Ágota Kristóf: Verlorene Tage / Lost Days, in: Frühe Ungarische Gedichte / Early Hungarian Poems
Translation from Kristóf’s own French version into German and American: Stefanie Woerdemann

2015 Helmut Oehring, librettist Stefanie Woerdemann, sounddesigner Torsten Ottersberg and actress and singer Dagmar Manzel, commissioned by Statestheatre Wiesbaden, started creating AGOTA? The Illiterate (Yesterday/Somewhere) as a search for identity and language in the prose and poetry of Ágota Kristóf and for the posibilities of contemporary multimedia musictheatre. With changing narrative perspectives the Hungarian exile-writer Ágota Kristóf, who died 2011 in Switzerland, had focussed her main issue: the search for identity in an unfeeling world. Through the singularity of her very special exile French, which remained a strange language for her until her death, she gained herself centre stage of her narrative: her searching for language, the meaning and loss of language, the possibility and impossibilty of language …