infotext:
The Taken I have the novel as the basis for my fourth opera The Taken Chosen by Witold Gombrowicz because, in addition to telling a compelling story, it also relates characters that we know well from today's perspective. A young couple is at the center of the action and has broken out in a mutual love-hate relationship. Both are constantly trying to prove themselves to each other in the competition over borderline experiences. In doing so, neither of them thinks of anything other than fleeing from themselves, and all the other self-obsessed people in this piece also share a diffuse area of primal fears as the only remaining denominator of shared experience, about which they relate to different and yet define in a representative way. At the center of the action is a kind of curtain, a towel that makes itself felt in a dark corner of a castle kitchen through mysterious movements and distortions, and which in the context is symbolic of this collective subconscious, which has become imageless, unrecognizable and inexplicable for everyone involved creates nameless horror. Ultimately, this fear leads to various stages of self-destruction. Since everyone in his own way only has his own, mostly commercial, advantage in his relationship to the castle (a castle in which tradition and culture are preserved), his own competitive advantage in the struggle to increase property, but no sensorium for the inner life of cultural No one has more values or any kind of compassion that aligns with connecting undercurrents of interpersonal concern. The paradigm decay creates an alienated relationship to tradition and culture. Selfishness and identification through extreme forms of self-awareness (killing as an act of identification) appear as bulwarks against the imponderable danger of self-loss. You're rich, you're beautiful, and you're doing everything you can to not be what you actually become: invisible. The acting persons act without binding ethical and moral norms, which could still be helpful when confronted with one's own reflection, an evaluation of one's own actions. Instead, they surrender to all sorts of deformations of self-reference and enrichment: one rushes from stimulus to stimulus, from role to role without appearing in it, and succumbs to an obsessive nomadic attitude in a world without footing. The music of possessed is based on the relationship between the different times represented by the characters in the piece in which they live and with which they feel they belong, and on the image of this strange haunted entity that throws the people of this story into confusion.Elements of old music and commercial Media combine with the composer's own sonic language to form a web of structural relationships, which in the course of the piece, like the folds of a cloth, a fan that slowly closes and leaves an imageless axis, formally condenses into a center that encompasses everything absorbs. Driven on the one hand by unsteady restlessness, on the other hand interrupted by a lurking emptiness, the music is a game with genre clichés which, like motivic core elements, like small modules, are repeatedly coupled with one another and determine the course of the musical event, as elements of a closed system that pretends to develop, but in reality goes in circles. Johannes Kalitzke The plot Ms. Ocholowska has arranged for her daughter Maja to marry Cholawicki, one of her employees. Cholawicki also takes care of an old prince - hoping to inherit his art collection. His plan is to sell the paintings and build a luxury hotel with the proceeds. However, a young man named Leszczuk arouses Maja's interest. Together, the two want to get hold of the paintings and flee. Cholawicki brings the art historian Skolinski to the prince to have his art collection appraised. At the same time he tells him that the castle is haunted. A long time ago, the prince did not recognize his illegitimate son Franio. Tried out of shame Cholawicki wants the prince to write his will and leave the paintings to him; however, he is unsuccessful. The sight of the suffering prince fascinates Maja. The planned marriage between Maja and Cholawicki is doomed to failure. Now Maja's mother wants to marry her daughter off to an old, rich man named Maliniak. This demands sex from Maja, but is murdered shortly before the engagement party. Everyone accuses each other of murder. Maya helps the prince to believe that his son has forgiven him. She breaks the curse of the cursed towel and the prince finds his peace. Cholawicki takes the paintings and sells them - despite protests from the art historian, who insists that these treasures belong to the people. Maja and Leszczuk see no future together and separate. She wants a different, better life while he's just looking for new distractions. Kasper Holten |
program:
Johannes Kalitzke (* 1959)
The Taken
Opera in four acts (2008–2009)
Libretto by Christoph Klimke based on the novel by Witold Gombrowicz
Work commissioned and produced by Theater an der Wien
Live recording of the world premiere, February 19, 2010
[01] first act 22:47
[02] Second Act 17:20
[03] third act 21:02
[04] Fourth Act 14:01
total time: 75:11
Maya (soprano) Hendrickje van Kerckhove
Madame Ocholowska (mezzo soprano) Noa Frenkel
Cholawicki (baritones) Leigh Melrose
Leszczuk (tenor) Benjamin Hulett
Prince Holszanski (male alto) Jochen Kowalski
Skolinski (bass) Manfred Hemm
Maliniak (baritones) Rupert Bergman
stage director Kasper Holten
Design set Steffen Aarfing
Costume design Marie i Dali
Lighting design Jesper Kongshaug
Sound Forum Vienna
Vera Fischer / Wolfgang Zuser, flutes
Markus Deuter, oboe
Bernhard Zachhuber / Olivier Vivarès, clarinets
Lorelei Dowling, Bassoon
Gerald Preinfalk / Lars Mlekusch, saxophones
Christoph Walder, horn
Anders Nyqvist, trumpet
Andreas Eberle, trombone
József Bazsinka Jr., tuba
Annette Bik / Gunde Jäch-Micko / Sophie Schafleitner / Fani Vovoni, violin
Dimitrios Polisoidis / Andrew Jezek, viola
Benedikt Leitner / Andreas Lindenbaum / Nikolay Gimaletdinov, cello
Dario Calderone / Maximilian Ölz, double bass
Christopher Brandt, electric guitar
Virginie Tarrête, harp
Krassimir Sterev, accordion
Lukas Schiske / Björn Wilker, percussion
Florian Müller, piano
Alfonso Alberti, keyboards
Peter Böhm & Florian Bogner, sound design
Johannes Kalitzke, conductor
Press:
4/2013
[…] In four of his own works to date, Kalitzke (born 1959) has shown what he, as a composer, understands by new music theatre. He is also a critical observer of the zeitgeist, a resourceful designer who inscribes sound clichés from commerce and the canon into his pieces with a keen ear, biting irony and amazing expertise. But KaIitzke does not preach with the tongues of Marx and Engels, he rather sticks with Freud, dives into the lower layers of consciousness, where fear and the repressed flourish, where the hell of the normal rumbles.
It is no coincidence that he chose a modern gothic novel as the basis for his latest opus: “The Possessed” (1939), Witold Gombrowicz' Polish answer to Kafka's dystopian “castle” vision. The tremendously colourful, energetic, sometimes black-humoured, parodistic music revolves in itself, a virtuoso swirling sound vortex whose pull magically draws the listener in like the auratic presence of the dead prince's son Franio draws the ghostly figures in Gombrowicz's literary spook.
The form-giving symbol of this empty, black center is a towel in the castle kitchen that is being unfolded and folded by supernatural forces, with which Franio is said to have hanged himself. A mysterious force field that unfortunately remains underexposed in Christoph Klimke's libretto, which is largely broken down into the conventional operatic relationship box format (see OW 4/2010). Text and sound fall apart, the dialogues of the seven characters, trimmed for action, blatantly shorten the introspection of their obsessions noted in the score - and thus a decisive quality of the novel.
The Theater an der Wien, where Kalitzke presented the 75-minute four-act play in February 2010, can now present the sound record of the premiere with the analytically gripping Klangforum Wien thanks to the ORF, the Kunststiftung RW and the label NEOS. And be happy that Kalitzke's sound fantasy moves into the center of perception - the kaleidoscopic shimmering, the differentiating diversity of expression, the suggestive mood pictures of an excellently constructed literary chamber opera, which, through the libretto, so to speak, eavesdrops on the secrets of a fascinating prose text of the 20th century.
Albrecht Thieman
11/2012
egomaniac
Johannes Kalitzke's “Die Besessenen” is one of the more notable opera premieres of recent years. The adaptation of the novel of the same name by Witold Gombrowicz did not represent a departure for new shores, but it was anything but a dusty literary opera. Kalitzke and his librettist Christoph Klimke condensed the complex material for the Theater an der Wien into an abysmal relationship drama about egomania and loss of identity, which reactivated the good old operatic virtues of classical modernism. […]
Music: 
Sound:
Dirk Wieschollek
10.10.2012
Ambiguous music theater
Neos publishes the exciting world premiere recording of Johannes Kalitzke's opera 'The Besessenten'.
Johannes Kalitze's four-act opera 'Die Besessenen' (2008/09), the composer's fourth work for the opera stage, premiered in February 2010 at the Theater an der Wien and is based on the novel of the same name by Witold Gombrowicz. Different, mutually dependent and related narrative strands permeate each other in a pointed way – that of the aged Prince Holszanski, tormented by pangs of conscience, that of the calculating Madame Ocholowska, who wants to make as much capital as possible from the youth of her daughter Maja, while she in turn turns to the tennis teacher Leszczuk throws at him, that of the insidious administrator Cholawicki, who - like the art historian Skalinski and everyone else - is after Holszanski's valuable collection of paintings - and finally also elements of a horror story, tied to a murderous towel that is said to be up to mischief in the castle drives and serves as a projection surface for the fears of all protagonists.
The repertoire of figures that appears here, consisting exclusively of 'possessed' people who are self-destructively chasing after their supposed happiness and thus looking for a way out of the constantly circling everyday life, which is solely geared towards economic added value, is extremely well suited for a musico-dramatic implementation, especially since it is far more concise in Christoph Klimke's libretto than in the sprawling novel. Klimke's sometimes almost woodcut-like reduction offers the ideal conditions for Kalitzke, whose special musical approach contributes precisely those nuances and nuances that the librettist dispensed with. The composer proves to be a master of subtle and ambiguous characterization, reacts to the thinned-out dialogue with a variety of formal forms (e.g. Hoquetus, Toccata or Chorale) and stylistic allusions (e.g. to popular music and waltz sounds) and thus creates a varied instrumental panorama, the on a vocal level corresponds to a varied lead of the singing voices. He derives all of these elements from a system of the smallest core elements that are constantly being permuted and newly coupled with one another, thereby avoiding the character of a mere collage by subordinating all the means of design to a uniform language that is idiomatically toned down again and again.
musical realization
As the conductor of the present publication from the house of Neos, recording of the world premiere production, Kalitzke also proves to be the ideal advocate for his own work and repeatedly brings out what is uncomfortable about the score: thanks to the excellent musical achievements of the Klangforum Wien, the implementation of the instrumental layer is enormously vivid devices. Especially where musical layers collide, where breaks between differing gestural moments emerge or allusions emerge from the sounds, the brilliant sound quality of the recording also opens up an enormous dimension of depth. This detail is also due to the fact that the opera on CD manages quite well without the background of the scenic realization and, due to the drama transferred to the music, in passages unfolds the qualities of a radio play. This becomes tangible right at the beginning, where the sounds first develop out of an ostinato - according to the stage direction, the protagonists are watching a tennis match with increasing distraction - and gradually branch out more and more and grow into instrumental pinpricks.
The singers also make their contribution to the success of the recording: the intense expression, for example, that baritone Leigh Melrose bestows on Cholawicki's exalted chanting, contributes just as much to characterization as the dialogue between soprano Henrickje van Kerckhofe (as Maja) and tenor Benjamin Huletts (as Leszczuk), whom Kalitzke unmasks through a damaged tonality as the opposite of ineffective communicative gestures. While mezzo-soprano Noa Frenkel as Madame Ocholowska is confident in the coloratura, but overall remains a little inflexible due to her consistently nervous, vibrating tone, countertenor Jochen Kowalski surprises in his small but fine role as Holszanski. In addition, bass Manfred Hemm appeals to him with the insinuating way he plays the bustling art historian Skolinski, and baritone Rupert Bergmann has a short and memorable appearance as the lascivious Maliniak. How the vocal and instrumental achievements come together to form a coherent overall appearance, which at the end leads to a tonally denatured return from the beginning, in which the tonal substance of the music evaporates into glass-like sounds, is clearly worth listening to.
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Booklets:
dr Stefan Drees