Worktexts AshenMOON | helmutoehring

T H E D A Y A L E C T O

frees he dead ‘freed from their eternal chains.’ In PROLOGUE: WendeSONNE (Turning Sun) of the opera AscheMOND (AshenMOON), the countertenor invokes the comforting power of music with Purcell's Music for a while: despite all suffering and the omnipresent death, it keeps the resistance alive in people: not to give up until Alecto ‘drops the snakes from her head and the whip from her hand.’ Music reveals and preserves the utopia of a possibility that the eternal human cycle of life and death, love and loss, guilt and revenge could be broken.

'All lives end. All hearts break. Always.'

Alecto, one of the three Erinyes of classical antiquity, originates from archaic myths: as the Greek goddess of vengeance and the raging Roman fury, she unites the closely linked areas of fertility and death cults in ancient matriarchal cultures. Alecto: female guardian of sexuality and love, birth and life, dying and death.

Alecto as a primal fairy, companion to women.
FuryFairy, avenger of female suffering.
PrimalSister of Shakespeare's Titania and Purcell's Fairy Queen.

At the beginning of Interference (Summer), the choir in Helmut Oehring's setting of Heine's poem Sonnenuntergang (Sunset) adds another sister to Alecto, Titania and the Fairy Queen: MOON, the primordial woman of archaic myths, who, after separating from SUNman, travels her lonely path towards eternity. Fairy Queen/MOON wanders through the seasons of AscheMOND as a companion to the protagonists, suffering from her own experience. She emphatically monitors and endures individual women's lives and remains – trapped in the eternal cycle – a witness to the female suffering of past, present and future generations. She refuses to forget, she takes revenge – also by passing on a little more of her silent language of anger, her quiet articulation of powerlessness and grief, from one generation of women to the next, in view of the danger and fragility they face.

Alecto's angry roar and the silent cries of MOON – signs of related languages.

‘Inscriptions on the MOONsurface. SilentASHES.’ Helmut Oehring

Alecto, the ‘insatiable’ in her quest for retribution for human guilt at the moment of death, marks the utopian turning point with her retreat, like the Fairy Queen and MOON the moment when the cycle of human violence and human suffering is interrupted. ‘And once death is dead, there will be no more dying,’ sings the women's choir in the Epilogue, after the countertenor has invoked Music for a while a second time. Throughout the opera, Fairy Queen/MOON has accompanied the suffering and dying of a woman before our ears and eyes and, after Annihilation (Winter), it now looks down into the abyss of life and death. Nevertheless, music embodies development, change and possibility. Music embodies the utopia that there could be a possibility after all the inadequacies of life. Music is a companion in times of hardship, but also in times of possibility. For the narrator dismisses the eternal guardian of mankind, and she too may now finally rest: ‘Moon, take thy flight. Now die, die, die, die, die...’

Stefanie Wördemann, June 2013

T H E R E M U S T B E T H I S K I N D O F C R Y F R O M T I M E T O T I M E

And this cry moves or tears apart the curtain that may separate us from the truth – from the ‘unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing’ (Scott Fitzgerald). Music is such a cry. Shakespeare's sonnets are such a cry. Solar eclipse in the moment of emerging silence and muteness.

AscheMOND is a hymn to transience. Dark and urgent. An opera set during a summer night and at the same time in the endless yet finite flow of the seasons – in Heine's sense: 'our summer is a winter painted green'. AscheMOND sings of the forces that make the earth turn and move hearts. It tells stories in music, paints pictures of fundamental conflicts and loyalties. Of the human factor, of the elemental questions of human coexistence. We all seem to have both feet firmly planted in life. But in reality, we are all despondent, thoughtful, tender, we think about death every day, we write diaries and love letters, we raise children and yet we know about our failures. The emotional core of AscheMOND lies less in the densely narrated but abstractly entangled snapshots. The real essence of this opera lies rather in its philosophical superstructure: all human beings are existentially connected to each other. The mental and emotional attitudes that we humans produce outlive time and death.

Shakespeare saw tragedy in, above, beside, beneath and between every comedy. Both universal human tragedy and individual tragedy. But he also saw hope in every tragedy, for all people, for every individual, for those who follow the tragically hopeless and failed. For the children, the subsequent generations. Those who are born into a new morning, a new spring, a new society, a new age, and set out on their own lives. Shakespeare's sonnets can only be understood at first glance as individual death, as a description of transience, of the dying of the hunger for life and the lust for love. Much deeper, they are a positive charge of contact with one another. Togetherness. Community beyond death.

This opera looks at the limbo between this world and the next, life and death, love and loss. Between the ravishing beauty of life and its many unnecessary everyday devaluations, such as existential threats. Everything sparkles and then fades away again, leaving sadness in its wake – and yet, at the end, in the epilogue with the concluding Shakespearean women's choir, a new spark glimmers: utopia.

We call this opera AscheMOND a systemic music theatre work: it is not the individual in the form of a main character who is in the foreground here – the Fairy Queen, the silent sign language soloist, moves in the background as a mourning, compassionate MOON being. Instead, the statements about groups of people themselves are more important. Compassion is not directed at individuals, but at many, ultimately ALL people. Of course, this means that nuances of individual relationship dynamics fall by the wayside: although the individual protagonists are highly social and emotionally sensitive and interconnected, there is a lack of time and opportunity to empathise with the individual characters. The focus is rather on togetherness. And the claimed loyalty in the face of impending disasters, triggered by our own violence or that of nature, and inevitable death. At the centre is empathy with humanity, with our own species and with our planet, which exists in the light and shadow of its celestial companions...

Helmut Oehring + Stefanie Wördemann, June 2013

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