Three people are desperately trying to make music together. A singer, a pianist and a sound artist are enclosed in different boxes. They can’t see each other, only hear each other. Even they don’t know what will happen in the next five hours of this Beethoven performance. They experience their separation as increasingly agonizing, while the audience is allowed to pass through changing sound spheres and enter the speakers individually. Will the artists be freed? An installation about relationships, physical distance and media communication.
The sound installation FERNSTE GELIEBTE is based on the song cycle “An die ferne Geliebte” by Ludwig van Beethoven. The focus is on the motif of insurmountable distance: people who want to be together but cannot be together. It is not only the lyrical ego, the speaker of the song cycle, who complains about this. The composer himself also suffered from addiction, mental disorders and deafness, which separated him from others and society. can take minutes. Material flows in from high and pop culture. Sometimes the audience experiences Beethoven’s music in the original, sometimes electro-acoustically alienated and surrounded by artificial sound environments.
The walk-in concert installation by trugschluss and HIDALGO now breaks with the conventional concert form. She transfers music, text, biography and associations into a spatial dimension. Singer, pianist, sound artist and audience are separated from each other in the basic arrangement. They are located in different places: the artists in boxes, the audience around them. Although everyone can hear each other, they can only communicate directly with each other for brief moments. The audience is only allowed to join the artists in the boxes one at a time. The audience thus becomes part of the installation – and the insurmountable distance can be physically experienced.
The framework is thus predetermined, but anything can happen, the artists react spontaneously. The audience literally moves between them through the music. Instead of the original 15 minutes, the song cycle is stretched to five hours. The music pauses at concise passages. Every word becomes significant and chord changes can take minutes. Material flows in from high and pop culture. Sometimes the audience experiences Beethoven’s music in the original, sometimes electro-acoustically alienated and surrounded by artificial sound environments.
The Munich trugschluss collective and HIDALGO have designed the walk-in concert installation FERNSTE GELIEBTE as a co-production. The premiere was staged on September 14, 2020 on a parking garage deck not far from Munich Central Station. Here, ideas such as urbanity, mobility and distance met symbolically. The gray dreariness of the place stood in particular contrast to the idyllic images of nature in Beethoven’s song cycle. Re-performances can take place in the open air, but also indoors.
IMPRESSIONS
OCCUPATION
The cast corresponds to the usual artistic level of HIDALGO and its artist collective. The artists may vary depending on availability.
