✭✭✭✩✩

by Beat Furrer, directed by Michael Simon

Theater Aachen

October 14, 18, 21, 25, 27, November 4, 19 & 26, 2000

In Aachen I went to see a performance of the opera DIE BLINDEN by Austrian

composer Beat Furrer in a production by Michael Simon.  Though written in

1987, this is the line of the old-style avant-garde anti-operas that assume

a rather high level of intellectual sophistication in the audience.  The

libretto for the opera is a German translation of Maeterlinck’s play “Les

Aveugles” interleaved with sections of Plato’s “Parable of the Cave” sung in

Greek.  The relation of orchestra to stage is completely reversed.  The

orchestra and singers are placed behind a scrim on the stage while a kind if

stage is made by covering over the orchestra pit.  From this surface rise a

rotating movie screen on one pillar and a video monitor on another.  

As the 90-minute opera progresses, a specially-commissioned film portrays a woman waking up and gradually preparing herself to go out into the everyday world of Aachen.  The film begins, intentionally, extremely out-of-focus but

gradually comes into sharper focus as the woman’s mind clears.  The video

monitor displays images that comment on those in the film.  At the close of

the work, the film and video go off as a woman in red sings a passage from

Rimbaud in French from the balcony of the house.  Just before she finishes a

little girl in red appears on the “stage” over the pit and the opera ends.

As the texts of Maeterlinck and Plato suggest, this is a work about our

perception of the world.  After the doubts posed by the two main texts, the

conclusion suggests that the metaphor that best represents our relation to

the world is the theatre.  Asking the good, aged burghers of Aachen to spend

a nice Sunday afternoon contemplating the nature of representation instead

of dying French courtesans or amorous aristocrats in disguise was obviously

a bit much.  More than half of the audience did not even bother to applaud.

Yet, from the conversations I overheard of those under 30, the work was an

exciting experience.  Personally, I haven’t been able to get the piece out

of my mind.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in the TheatreWorld (UK) 2002-12-31.

Photo: Scene from Die Blinden.  ©2002 Frank Heller.