The world is unfinished. Who would not sign that? Since the creation, which certainly would have been in need of improvement, a lot of edifying things have been done, but nevertheless everything was done with power and horror to destroy a halfway tolerable condition. The decline was hidden in every structure. And vice versa. So they set themselves up in this permanent provisional, fragment after fragment, enthusiastic for ideas that were long outdated tomorrow, and mourned utopias, which one never really believed yesterday.

The great American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) once attempted to bring to a close all these contradictions, these questions of where and where in a monumental work: he called it, of course, "Universe Symphony". because it combines more than the comprehensible and recognizable, should reach beyond our so narrow frame of experience, and he jumped boldly musically from the past into the future, from the deafening sound experience to the lyrical chamber music, from powerful wild drums to symphonic austerity ,

Ives swung from heaven to earth, back to the firmament, summoning nature and letting man into this world. Above all lay a strict compositional grid, sophisticated and branched, self-destructive - and so complicated that the composer could no longer cope. Ives gave up; but why should not he fail with his music, even though God himself was not quite finished with his work?

Ives left piecemeal: sketches, scores, notes, drafts. And he decreed, "In case I fail to complete this work, there may be someone else who tries to work out my thoughts." This is something a director like Christoph Marthaler can not say twice. The challenge of figuratively completing an ingeniously conceived work of art, which lies in the ears like a torso, was the challenge for the Swiss celebrator of theatrical slowness and high priests of scenic time-loss. The blanks left by Ives wanted to fill Marthaler with the power of his imagination.

Cacophonic thrill

He set "Incomplete" just as confidently as with the melancholy knowledge of his own inadequacy behind "Universe". And already he had the framework for a fascinating work of art of the unfinished, which begins with percussion sounds that seem to come from infinity, hiding in the invisible and in the poles high above our heads and ends so poetically spherical, that at least musically the dissonant disturbing sounds can hardly tarnish strangely soothing conclusion. Maybe the beauty is hidden in the missing?

The RuhrTriennale offered Marthaler the right, the big frame for his search in the shallows of the incomplete universe: a dozen actors, two pianists, the complete Bochumer Symphoniker, the "Rhetoric Project" by Titus Engel in many (chamber) musical border areas who also had the entire musical direction), a drum quartet from Cologne and percussion students from various universities; Finally, the Bochum Jahrhunderthalle with its confusing bare steel skeleton, which was designed in all their endless breadth of Anna Viebrock and Thilo Albers. A perfect space for the sound, the silence, and the images that Marthaler hears from the compositions of Ives.

Because he not only takes the symphony, he mixes this puzzle with many other parts of the multi-faceted work of the American (from ragtime to the art song) and he not only lets different styles exist side by side, he mixes them, superimposes them, leaves They fight against each other until the cacophonic thrill. This is how that sound-space and space-sound emerges, which Ives may have dreamed of when he demanded of his music that they should not get stuck in the present and a fashionable taste, but should be all-embracing, beyond the simple feeling and the rigid thinking ,

An entanglement of bodies

Here at Marthaler, the people come into a game that knows no beginning or end in dealing with the truth and the lie, with the desires and disappointments. They populate the scenery, which is extensively filled with rows of benches, conference tables, grandstands, as lost and seekers. They go about peddling with their loneliness, they are always vying for contact with their neighbor, but all of this only ends in a desperate struggle, to which they do not seem to be coping. They collapse, fall as much as they like; they are lost or mistaken as forgotten through nothingness; they fall into the foreign languages, forming themselves into a dance that is then only a tangle of bodies that are greedy for contact and incapable of being near.

In sentences they articulate their fears. Since it may always go back to the September 11, as all murderers of civilization sarcastically a "You are leaving the American sector thrown", but it comes especially in a tour de farce to misunderstandings. Marthaler breaks down the universe with the lyrics (by Gerhard Falkner and Martin Kippenberger) and shows the chaos of the small-scale encounters and alienations of people, who in the collective squeaking with the chair legs find for a moment even more in common than in a conversation to which it never really comes.

They, too, all fail: they babble about the (also "mental") losses of this time ("Nietzsche to go" and who Osip Mandelstam was, nobody knows today) and complain about their own omissions: "I have not slept enough in this century" says one. But the other replies, "I've talked too little ..." Maybe that's the central phrase in Marthaler's work. A lawsuit.

Failure to look and hear, helplessness (Ives's work is called "The Unanswered Question"!) And somehow they all find themselves in front of the "Tomb of Unknown Seconds". The time of decision was ripe, but it has passed. Nothing was formed from the unfinished. Then they stand there, cramped and frozen. Incapacitate. The music passes them off perfidiously with a tauntingly flattering sound. A wonderful event!