The fact that a witch prays - not to the Prince of Darkness, for example, but actually to the Most High according to the 77th Psalm - hardly fits into the familiar children's fairy tale picture, but does not make the matter any less eerie. On the contrary: someone who has fallen out of the world who seeks refuge in God but no longer finds it and understands her own emptiness as a sign of devastating upheavals is a highly modern figure; today she might be a socially desperate, furiously zealous climate activist. Botho Strauss, a fine sensory expert on the morbid and dissolving, has condensed the biblical tradition about King Saul and the witch of Endor into an opera libretto. Wolfgang Rihm wanted to set it to music, which never happened. But at least one scene, the same demonically pious witch monologue,has now taken shape - as chamber music for soprano and violoncello, commissioned by the Musikfest Berlin and now premiered by Anna Prohaska and Nicolas Altstaedt.
It was one of two premieres in the chamber music hall of the Philharmonie. Jörg Widmann, an all-rounder not only as a composer and interpreter, but also in the tireless, occasionally over-revving circle of his own ideas, drew for the other. This is also the case this time, when his inventive and challenging fantasy condensed a scene from his “Babylon” opera into a surreal chamber play in which, in addition to the two named, Francesco Corti, jumping quickly between four keyboard instruments, participates. Inanna, the “sister lust”, wants to bring her loved one back from the realm of the dead - a reversed Orpheus constellation. With Prohaska's astonishing flexibility, one would not have been surprised if she had sung Death along with - as in the Schubert song. But that was what the cellist took care of,a little homeless in the vowels, but, with pale make-up and black robes, in his snot, grunts and growls not without a sarcastic sense of wellbeing.
Sturm-, Drang- and Kraftstreicher
The grotesquely forced seduction and overwhelming duel, pepped up with additional wind and percussion, costumes and light effects, was preceded by Heinrich Scheidemann's grieving “Pavana Lachrymae”, a quietly devoted prelude in which Corti was finally able to find himself after he was mainly in In the first half of the program, the storm, urge and power striker Altstaedt, who was so to speak inconsiderately rousing, mostly acting under full steam, was occasionally almost sidelined: Harmonium or harpsichord have only limited chances against such verve due to their limited dynamics. On the other hand, the understanding between the cellist and Anna Prohaska was great - with a program that spanned from the Renaissance to the present day, anarchistic and yet intricately targeted,one could also say in the context of the evening: witch-like. What the soprano presented, among other things, in four Handel arias (unfortunately, there was no mention of who was responsible for this and other, quite idiosyncratic shrinkage arrangements), was highly intelligent, never beautiful in the usual sense, but in its artificial condensation, secure focus and bitter emotionality absolutely haunting art of singing. Sometimes she astonished with completely disembodied tones that seemed to float freely in the room - like analog Altstaedt conjured up effects, as if his instrument split into two different bodies when changing positions, which even duetted with each other. That the interpreters in this unusual program were also their own dramaturges and that the sequence of pieces along with the bridging,had put them together into contradicting wholesaling interludes, will have had his own part in this freely resolved teamwork with the highest concentration.
It reached its climax in the almost fifteen-minute Rihm premiere, where vocal and instrumental voices moved to the limit of what is physically feasible, inwardly disheveled with only short islands of calm, exalted in the range of expression, but genuinely desperate in their processing of God and of the world.
When the word “not” - to quote the composer himself - repeated many times towards the end and choked down to a nasty depth, disintegrates and dissolves like moldy mushrooms, it leaves an oppressive little air and hope.
In the Old Testament, the Witch of Endor was a prophetess of doom.