Festival "Ja, Mai" at the Bavarian State Opera: Conversation with Georg Friedrich Haas

Created: 05/17/2022, 1:00 p.m

"Everyone can find their own suffering, which can be something completely different": The opera "Bluthaus" is about Nadja (Vera-Lotte Boecker), who was abused by her father.

© Monika Rittershaus

For the first time, the Bavarian State Opera invites you to the spring festival "Ja, Mai".

Hard fare is served: the two operas by Georg Friedrich Haas revolve around sometimes deadly extreme situations.

a conversation

"Ja, Mai" is the name of the new festival of the Bavarian State Opera, which starts this Wednesday in cooperation with the Residenztheater and the Volkstheater.

A nice ambiguity to the Bavarian "Ja mei".

But while that is, as it were, a verbal expression of the sausage, the rather rudimentary interest, the shrugging of the shoulders in one's destiny, "Ja, Mai" is about the nitty gritty.

Especially when it comes to the two operas by Georg Friedrich Haas, “Bluthaus” and “Thomas”.

It revolves around elementary events in human life.

About extreme situations that are too often suppressed - here about abuse in the parental home and saying goodbye to a loved one.

In his works, Haas increasingly devoted himself to such interfaces between this world and the afterlife.

Not least in the opera "Koma", which had to be canceled and postponed: it was not possible to ensure that the MusicAeterna orchestra and its conductor Teodor Currentzis would arrive there without any problems.

In 2024, “Koma” is to be made up for.

In Haas' works, the music gives the audience the opportunity to empathize with another dimension.

Haas wants to show “The Metaphysics of the Physical”.

"Shared pain is half of the pain.

That's exactly what happens in art,” says the composer.

“Everyone can sympathize and rediscover their own suffering, which can be something completely different.

And that this is possible in music is wonderful.”

Composer Georg Friedrich Haas wrote “Bluthaus” and “Thomas”.

© Harald Hoffmann

But what forms of suffering are we talking about?

"Bluthaus", which premiered in its latest version in Vienna in 2014, is about Nadja.

For years she was sexually abused by her father.

After the death of her parents, she wants to put an end to the past by selling the house she inherited.

"I'm Nadja," says Haas.

His parents wanted to make a Nazi out of him.

Another kind of emotional abuse still working in him.

At the time of composition, he could not speak on the subject.

It was only possible for him in the cryptic manner of opera.

"That was essential for my survival."

All the more impressive that the poet Händl Klaus wrote the libretto independently of Haas' life story.

The fruitful working relationship was “founded”, as Haas puts it, by director Georges Delnon at the Schwetzingen SWR Festival.

"It was like love at first sight.

It really sparked when we first worked together.

He wrote the lyrics and I didn't bother him.

And then I wrote the music, and he didn't bother me."

This is also the case with the second collaboration “Thomas”.

Haas was given the libretto by Händl at the premiere party for "Bluthaus".

Thomas is in the hospital at the deathbed of his lover Matthias.

After his death, he falls into a kind of trance from grief.

While keeping vigil, he talks to Matthias.

And at some point he hears him answer.

They eat minestrone together.

"It doesn't get any lower than that," says Haas.

"Everyday life is back.

That's so wonderful.” In the end, it remains an open question whether a miracle happened and the dead Matthias rose again or not.

An opera that brings death into reality

It is important for Haas that real life appears in the opera.

You constantly see people dying in fictional series and films.

However, in a way that very few people experience.

It's the same with the opera deaths.

They didn't matter anymore either.

"Thomas" brings death into reality.

At the hospital, Haas immediately thinks of the whirring, humming, and wheezing of the machines.

"I can't have a normal symphony orchestra play there." So he combines plucked instruments that actually have nothing to do with each other: guitar, harpsichord, mandolin, zither, harp.

The strings are retuned according to a complex system.

The computer measured 1,600 different notated pitches.

A case for the Guinness Book, suspects Haas.

But that's not what he's about.

For him, all music is microtonal.

For example, the shades that make Maria Callas' voice so special come from singing slightly above or below the pitch, the composer explains.

Just as much that you don't perceive it as wrong, but recognize a special color.

"If I work in microtonality, then in this tradition."

At the "Ja, Mai" festival, "Bluthaus" and "Thomas" are combined with works by Claudio Monteverdi.

He is a genius for Haas.

"The way he makes the technique of musical rhetoric of his time timeless by dramatizing it is unbelievable!" But the combination itself doesn't matter to him.

"I wrote my opera, and if you have to add something to it, that's fine," he says, smiling.

Works that he is currently working on are important to him.

But he doesn't talk about her.

"When I compose, I think in terms of music.

Not in words.”