Vier Blicke auf ein Ich - Deutsche Oper Berlin
Four outlooks on an I
One character, four voices: Rebecca Saunders has composed her debut opera, LASH, to fit her four performers. The result: a portrait as much of one woman as of the women who embody her.
Anna Prohaska Like Rebecca, I live in Berlin, so very early on we met up in her lovely flat and tried stuff out, proper improv. She asked me what things I can do with my voice that are out of the ordinary. I told her I could sing backwards, meaning while breathing in, and I could whistle well and also yodel. And I love baroque music. And it so happens that my role is a blend of Monteverdi warblers, yodellers and experimental singing techniques. To that extent Rebecca is doing similar to what Mozart and Verdi did in writing roles with individual singers in mind. In fact, the four letters in the title refer to our respective roles; my letter is A. We’re not four different protagonists, though; we’re the prism for a single character. The music is the light source coming from every direction and we produce the shades of colour and facets of a personality. Our (spoken) melodies, right down to the dynamics, are meticulously drawn. But for all the complexity, they’re still a language of the body, a music that’s breathing, trembling, living.
Sarah Maria Sun When the music arrived, I was gobsmacked. Rebecca has come up with stuff I’ve never seen or heard or read before. And my repertoire isn’t exactly small; I’ve probably done 2,000 different works covering the 20th and 21st centuries. The protagonist is split into four singers, with each character having her own way of expressing herself vocally. There are solo stretches, meaning arias, and also duets, trios and occasional quartet moments - choral. There’s no linear storyline. The texts cover themes like sensuality, erotica, body, intimacy, hierarchy, sex. Rebecca’s opera is cool partly because things aren’t conveyed semantically or via a plot. Instead, it’s a sensuous (self-) acknowledgement in audio form. So for us musicians it’s like, form meets content. LASH is going to be music the likes of which none of us have ever sung and hardly ever heard. It’ll be quite a ride: sensual, critical, amusing. Definitely not to be missed.
Noa Frenkel Every new role I take on starts off in my body. I want to feel the music bodily, every sound and syllable. Rebecca’s music is made to be lived, not just sung. I’m going to be whispering, stuttering, breathing and singing. My role has an aria called »Longing«, full of sighing and wanting and communicator’s block. My facet of the woman represents her deeply and physically felt yearning. In the run-up to the project I met up with Rebecca in her flat in Berlin and we spent time testing stuff, improvising, talking, laughing. She took notes, sounded me out, asked me what I could do. And then she said something I’ve never heard from a composer before: »If you find bits where you need a break, let me know.« I’m the kind of person who wrestles with a new piece of music until I’ve nailed it, like a Ninja. With Rebecca, it’s the singer and what the singer can do with their voice that’s the starting point. When I got the score, I thought: wow, she knows me pretty well, and these lines of song are just gorgeous.
Katja Kolm I’m an actor and when I take on a role I always start with the words. With LASH it wasn’t that simple. The English libretto is abstract in the way a poem is. Before I started working on the opera, I found an English actress to help me whip my English into shape, and we practised tongue-twisters every day. Later on in the process I went through the libretto sentence by sentence, so it made sense – to me. LASH is about a woman who splits her personality four ways: four voices, four personas, all in a psychological state of emergency. It’s about pain, about the inexpressible. Rebecca is ultra-precise in her way of composing. When I look through her score, I can tell exactly what it was she wanted to articulate at a given point. It’s like with Goethe: when you speak his verse with the scanning he intended, it’s clearer what he wanted to convey. That’s what fascinates me. I internalise Rebecca’s sound and try to find a psychological motive that works for me so that I can render the words. And I internalise the words, so that the end result is a living person.
