“Songs of exil and no return”: For the by now fourth coproduction of Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Munich Biennale, the Austrian composer Bernhard Gander will set a libretto by the Ukrainian author Serhij Zhadan to music, and he will develop a new opera together with the director Alize Zandwijk and the soloists of Ensemble Modern and Deutsche Oper Berlin. In this work commissioned by the Munich Biennale, the contents of Gander’s and Zhadan’s music theater piece are orientated towards the theme of the coming festival edition: the term “friendship.”
In their world premiere Gander and Zhadan examine the deeply complicated borderlines and lines of friendship that run between previously united countries. Using an exemplary border post situation, Zhadan’s text negotiates the dramatic effects of war, displacement and flight on the human individual. The characters who appear here find themselves confronted with the question of how one should make a decision for a cause when the cultural, historical, political, and individual-biographical relationships are too complex and contradictory in themselves for one “correct” decision to be able to still succeed.