Griessner Stadl?

What is this, where is this?

An Austrian insider tip.

Around 150 kilometers south of Salzburg, in Styria on the border with Carinthia, there is a historic barn in the Mur valley that dates back to 1767 and was built using traditional craftsmanship.

In 2015 it was lovingly restored according to old models and has since been an art barn, which Anita Winkler and Ferdinand Nagele have expanded into a place for cultural events with a newly founded art association.

Plays by Elfriede Jelinek have already premiered here twice, and this summer the organizers have launched an even bolder project: a new folk opera based on Heinrich von Kleist's novella "The Earthquake in Chili", written in 1806. The starting point is the devastating earthquake in St. Jago in 1647. Composition: Elisabeth Harnik from Graz;

"Home, Art, Radical" are the themes that the artistic director Ferdinand Nagele set up to spark new life in the valley where he grew up.

The connection to home is underlined by the fact that lay people from the area are always involved in the productions. Art must not be an elitist ghetto, but should open up to society as a whole, and it must be radical, go to the roots and expose traditions.

This has appealing consequences, because transgression is the paradigm of all performances.

Brass band music mixes with new music, experimental jazz with folk singing, dance, film and conversations.

This year, the Austrian would say, the highlight is the opera, tailored to the special conditions of the place: six musicians (double bass, flute, electric guitar, accordion, portative - a portable organ - and drums).

Three of the musicians come from the Grazer Ensemble Schallfeld, the others are amateurs.

The stage, which runs lengthways through the auditorium, is enlivened by two female and two male singers.

They embody the couple Josephe and Jeronimo, who set disaster in motion through their forbidden love and the conception of a child, and the couple Don Fernando and Donna Elvire, who stand by them.

Also this time two professionals, two amateurs.

With such a small cast, roles are reversed, and there is no choir of its own, but the musicians speak the choral passages, which is also not part of their natural craft.

What Kleist developed like a supposed miracle also happens in the course of this chamber music opera - through skilful changes of tempi, expansion and compression, special musical accents, for example when the night after the earthquake in the idyllic valley is greeted by a gentle double bass Accompanied solo, or the raging, bloodthirsty mob demanding and taking revenge on the guilty, accompanied by excited, disturbing drumming.

Music and events on stage never drown each other out, do not compete, but sound out the tension in space in a differentiated way.

The ensemble only had three weeks to find each other.

In the opening chorus, when the musicians chant the beginning of the novella strictly in the manner of Kleist, the intelligibility of the text is still unbalanced, somewhat bumpy,

but as the game progresses, everyone gains confidence and precision, finding their roles to the point of brilliance.

The audience, about a hundred people in the barn, was held in suspense and followed the horrible events with great attention.

In 2018, Jossi Wieler and Sergo Morabito said goodbye to the Stuttgart State Opera with a commission for the composition of the "Earthquake in Chili" from the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, the libretto was written by the Büchner Prize winner Marcel Beyer.

Here an opera with all the machinery and equipment of a large house, in the Griessner Stadl only a minimalist, but finely chiseled form.

The basis of the text is comparable.

Marcel Beyer took the novella further, placed it linguistically in the present and loaded it with expressionism.

Martin Kreidt, the librettist and director at the Griessner Stadl, has complete faith in Kleist's original.

His libretto thickens the novella without a word of addition.

Respect for the old master Kleist does you good, because the ambivalences,

Musically, the composer Elisabeth Harnik also finds an appropriate language.

For the singers, she works with the overtone series, both to make the score manageable for the layperson and to weave different values ​​into the new music.

Portative and accordion set idiosyncratic soundtracks, the other instruments twine smoothly around the text or soar to breathtaking climaxes.

From now until August 25, "The Chili Earthquake" will be shown five more times.