As of: February 13, 2024, 8:59 a.m
By: Markus Thiel
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What does this villa hide?
In search of a corpse, the player is led to mysterious places.
© Home game
When it comes to digital technology, no other theater is as advanced as the Augsburg State Theater.
The next step: Schönberg's “Expectation” is now available as an amazing video game.
A self-experiment.
At some point you will hold it in your hands.
The dead lover mourned by the nameless woman in this opera.
You can pull your head towards you, turn your body and notice in horror: blood is coming out of your eyes.
Or is it raining the drops?
And the most amazing thing: none of this is real.
It happens in a parallel reality that requires you to put on headphones and VR glasses.
Digital nerds have long been familiar with this from their game consoles when they play through wild virtual worlds and have to solve tasks.
But opera as a video game, that's new.
The Augsburg State Theater is a global pioneer in this regard - and Arnold Schönberg's "Expectation", this half-hour "mono-opera", premiered in 1909, is the perfect piece for this.
By the time you come across the corpse, you've had a long journey behind you.
Through a dark forest that is only illuminated by the moon.
The player takes on the role of the singing woman.
You can literally feel the teetering, restless walk through the darkness.
If you turn your head, you will experience a 360 degree animation.
And anyone who knows the film “Blair Witch Project” will look around more often: Are you being chased by nameless dangers in this forest?
Occasionally you stop in clearings where the music stops: from now on you can play.
If you don't act completely stupid, you can spend around an hour playing the video game - a self-experiment in the alternative venue of the Augsburg Theater.
© Jahnke
For newbies, it may not be easy to turn, move around, and, above all, figure out what you need to do at this point.
Eat a mushroom?
Or open the door of the mysterious villa?
Once you get to the top, you press the buttons on the control unit in vain - it was a wrong turn.
The developers at Heimspiel, this Augsburg “creative agency for digital,” have programmed an introduction for such cases.
There will be a helper at the public presentation in Augsburg.
“We should and wanted to keep things as simple as possible,” says Frank Patzke from Heimspiel.
His company had to do a balancing act: “Expectation” should satisfy classic video gamers, but also classic opera audiences.
The latter needs a reasonably new computer for the Schönberg experiment, but above all VR glasses and a console.
Then all you have to do is buy and download “Expectation” from Steam, the standard platform for video games – and the horrifying case can begin.
The Augsburg Theater started its VR campaigns in 2020
Schönberg describes a woman wandering through the forest in search of her lover.
She soon discovers his body.
This is also the case in video games.
But whoever solves the tasks ends up in a psychedelic landscape made of giant mushroom-shaped elements, and finally in the square of a big city - with a surprising ending.
Nothing more will be revealed here.
Augsburg director André Bücker is behind the gimmick.
In 2020, he implanted digital elements into an opera performance for the first time with the company Heimspiel: On command, you had to put on VR glasses for Gluck's “Orfeo ed Euridice” and fly through neon green Arcadia or through the flaming underworld.
During the Corona lockdown, fully digital productions were developed for which you could have glasses sent to your home.
Bückers Haus now has its own digital department.
“I’m not interested in just filmed theater,” he says, who also directed “Expectation” – if you can even call it that.
“I find it exciting what’s going on in the head of this singing woman and what dream logic elements you can play with.”
Digital and interactive opera premiere next season
Interactivity, i.e. intervening in the piece as in “expectation”, is Bücker’s further big step into the digital world.
The “soundtrack” was recorded at the Augsburg Congress at the Park with the local Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Domonkos Héja and Sally du Randt.
Musically, this is the very best for opera nerds: this soprano sings so expressively and with crystal clear clarity that you understand every word.
At some point you will also meet her digitally animated image.
And what this does isn't exactly pleasant... Intendant Bücker doesn't want to say how much the two-year development of “Expectation” cost.
“As much as a normal opera production.” He now wants to wait and see how his video game is received and whether it will reach new audiences.
Which doesn't mean that Augsburg's digital division is now taking a break: Bücker is announcing an opera premiere "as digital music theater with interactive components" for the coming season.
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If you don't act completely stupid, you can spend about an hour in the forest and in the glittering metropolis of Augsburg's “Expectation”.
Why the lover of the piece died remains unclear - but one can imagine his part.
And there's nothing to win.
Quite the opposite.
The video game
can be purchased and downloaded at https://store.steampowered.com;
Public performance
on February 17th at the Gaswerk Augsburg, tickets by calling 0821/3244900.