MAM. Manufaktur für aktuelle Musik

MUSIC THEATER world premiere

ELEONORE - I don't need to be happy
Liberation Opera

"I can still be happy" - Leonore sings longingly in Beethoven's opera Fidelio. In the end she did it. She has freed Florestan, her husband, and restored the previous status quo: a hero returns, at his side the self-sacrificing, devoted wife...

And that was it: the long desired happiness?

ELEONORE says: No! She has risked too much, she has gone too far. She has denied herself beyond recognition, overcome herself, shown courage and strength... And for what purpose? To be happy? What is this narrativ of individual happiness? Who are the characters around her - driven by delusions of grandeur, pressure to succeed and mediocre consumer dreams? These prisoners of their own promises for happiness, of their system - generating conformism, exploitation and oppression, denying contradictions and resistance? Eleonore must recognize this: Either one gives in or one is not gonna be happy for God‘s sake- nor as a woman, nor as a human being, nor as an artist...

ELEONORE - I don't need to be happy takes the opera Fidelio as a quarry for material and initiates a comprehensive reflection of the idea of the pursuit of happiness, of liberation and of the utopias associated with this, in the social and artistic contexts of today. The characters of the opera have their say, filtered through the writing of Charlotte Roos, Beethoven himself, whose musical language is translated, exaggerated and written over into the present day by Gordon Kampe, Oxana Omelchuk and DJ IIIvibe. A system critic that searches for potential to resist is translated into music. At its centre: the confrontation of opposite poles of music and world views. All this inside a system turning the risk of denying any contradiction.

ELEONORE - I don't need to be happy is a radically new interpretation. A noval, experimental, free music theatre that deals with the genre opera in a completely unconventional way and thus points out a great artistic potential for liberation of the future...

Deutsche Version >>>

ELEONORE - I don't need to be happy
Liberation Opera

Artistic direction: Frauke Meyer and Susanne Blumenthal

Composition: Oxana Omelchuk, Gordon Kampe and DJ Illvibe (Vincent von Schlippenbach)

Texts: Charlotte Roos

Musical direction: Susanne Blumenthal

Idea and direction: Frauke Meyer

Stage and costume: Uta Materne

Dramaturgy: Friederike Engel

Lighting design: Nico Kraima

Sound direction: Florian Zwißler

With: