The end of the Beethoven Year 2020: the Berlin Philharmonic Hall is destroyed, the orchestra finds itself covered in fine dust and wearing breathing masks in front of the devastated building, and in the midst of it all a strange stranger claims to be Beethoven himself. A star conductor ruthlessly tries to keep all the orchestra’s concert dates, and a young musician rebels against this autocrat. Meanwhile, the man who calls himself Beethoven pursues the goal of revising not only his Promethean works, but also all of humanity at once. After all, how can it actually be that an artificial intelligence finishes composing fragments of his compositions and this is also sponsored by a large telecommunications company?
The result is a furious and winking reckoning with a society that doesn’t seem to have become any smarter after the Enlightenment. Under fire is a (high) culture that instead of artistic creation has only its commodity value in mind and a world that systematically destroys its natural habitat. Thus Beethoven, the maestro, and the young woman engage in a verbal battle about what it means to recognize man in man.
The award-winning author Moritz Rinke, director Mathias Schönsee and the transcultural Trickster Orchestra interweave humorous drama with the musical cosmos of Beethoven – challenging Western-White-European music history in an un-heard-of way.
In the process, questions are posed such as: Can it be possible, then, to have the fragment of the 10th Symphony completed by an artificial intelligence?
DIRECTION
Mathias Schönsee
TEXT
Moritz Rinke, Mathias Schönsee
MUSIC
Ketan Bhatti/Cymin Samawatie/Niko Meinhold & Trickster Orchestra
MUSICAL DIRECTION
Cymin Samawatie
STAGE DESIGN & VIDEO
Rebecca Raue
DRAMATURGY
Bernhard Glocksin & Änne-Marthe Kühn
ASSISTANCE VIDEO
Luis Kürschner
WITH
Maya Alban-Zapata, Hansa Czypionka, Christian Kerepeszki, Cymin Samawatie and the Trickster Orchestra members Naoko Kikuchi, Sabrina Ma, Niko Meinhold, Ralf Schwarz, Cymin Samawatie, Milian Vogel, Wu Wei
world premiere on 2 December 2021
A production of the Neuköllner Oper in co-production with Theater Gütersloh.
A project within
Supported by
and
Presented by TIP Berlin
Photo: © Matthias Heyde