Aribert Reimann's Lear at the Salzburg Festival
Jul. 01, 2017
The Salzburg Festival presents Aribert Reimann’s opera Lear in a new production from August 20 to 29, starring baritone Gerald Finley as King Lear. Franz Wesler-Möst leads the Vienna Philharmonic with stage direction by Simon Stone.
Reimann's Lear, with a libretto by Claus H. Henneberg after Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, was composed for the Munich Opera Festival in 1976 and was a breakthrough work for the composer, having received countless productions across the world. Christian Arseni, Dramaturg of the Salzburg Festival, writes:
The music enables the audience to experience the action as a sequence of existential borderline situations – with an immediacy that is touching and stirring, sometimes even unsettling. Reimann’s highly individual, radical musical language displays an extraordinary tonal and expressive range extending from the most intimate internalization to explosions of untrammelled violence.
In a review of the world premiere production for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Wolfgang Schreiber detailed the sonic intensity of the score:
‘The standing chord begins to slowly vibrate from the bottom, like an earthquake’, this is how Reimann himself tries to describe the musical constellation in diary notes. For two and a half hours, the listener is captivated from the orchestra pit: with tone clusters of every intensity, quarter-tone frictions, several minutes of standing and turning sound surfaces, brass clusters of monstrous harshness, confusing rhythmic shifts, lyrical pausing of solo parts. These tonal means are applied for sharp characterization – of figures, demeanours, situations – never as mere material demonstration.
For more information on Aribert Reimann, visit schott-music.com.
Aribert Reimann
Lear (1976-1978)
opera in two parts after William Shakespeare’s King Lear
libretto (Ger) by Claus H. Henneberg
German translation by Johann Joachim Eschenburg
for 3 sopranos, countertenor (or tenor), 4 tenors, 2 baritones, 2 bass-baritones, speaking roles, and men's choir
3(3.pic, 3.bfl).afl.2.ca.2(2.ecl).bcl.2.cbsn-6.4.3.1-5/6perc-2hp-str(24.0.10.8.6)
185’