The Theory of Harmony

In autumn 2024, the Berlin opera company Novoflot will come to Cologne and present four produc­tions, including three world premieres, as part of the Arnold Schönberg cycle The Theory of Harmony, which it initiated.

5 October 2024, 8 pm, WDR Funkhaus

The Theory of Harmony #3:
A Murdered from Warsaw

(after theSur­vivor from Warsaw by Arnold Schönberg)
By Novoflot, Max Czollek and Michael Wert­müller
In co-production with the Kunstfest Weimar, the Musik­fes­tival Bern, the Kölner Phil­har­monie and the Theater in Delphi, Berlin.

World premiere: 6 October 2024, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum

A Gurrelied

By Novoflot and Arnold Schönberg
Based on indi­vidual parts from Arnold Schön­berg's large-scale oratorio "Gurre-Lieder" (1900–1903), Novoflot and film director Mirko Borscht develop a scenic-cine­matic rewriting of the medieval tragedy of jealousy and confront Schön­berg's late Romantic tonal language with cine­matic portraits of desperate lovers from the 21st century.

World premiere: 8 October 2024, 8 pm, Kölner Phil­har­monie

The Schönberg Gala

Arnold Schönberg will be 150 years old on 13 September 2024! A wonderful occasion to roll out the red carpet for this pioneering composer at the entrance to the Kölner Phil­har­monie. Together with the legendary singer Rosemary Hardy, the Norwegian actor Magne Brekke and the Cologne Asas­sello Quartet, among others, the artists of Novoflot will cele­brate a glit­tering Schönberg gala (including an auction!) in the concert hall of the Phil­har­monie and flood all the music to be heard with air from other planets!

World premiere: 8 October 2024, 9.30 pm, Rhein­treppen at the Phil­har­monie

Opera call: Desert music

Arnold Schön­berg's only opera "Moses and Aron" remained a fragment. As part of an opera call, Novoflot asked inter­na­tional composers for sugges­tions for the completion of the biblical music theatre. The result is a one-minute opera about the question of how the people led by Moses into the desert could continue. In a super­im­po­sition of sound instal­lation and scenic inter­ven­tions, this world premiere will take place in the open air on the Rhine steps right next to the Phil­har­monie.

Arnold Schoenberg composed the melodrama “SURVIVOR FROM WARSAW 1947” for a narrator, men’s choir, and orchestra. It addresses the suppression of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and, like its historical background, is one of the most poignant works in the history of music. It is a torn testimony of the most brutal dehumanization and one of the few works that explicitly addresses the Holocaust.

75 years after its premiere, the Berlin-based opera company Novoflot launches a REWRITING of the composition against the backdrop of historical and current war and displacement scenarios. For the development of the libretto reworking (the original text was by Schoenberg himself), the renowned Berlin author Max Czollek has been enlisted, whose books such as “Desintegriert euch” (Disintegrate yourselves) and, most recently, “Versöhnungstheater” (Reconciliation Theater) have sparked numerous societal debates. The composition will be undertaken by the Swiss sound artist Michael Wertmüller, an enfant terrible of the international jazz and composition scene, well-acquainted with Novoflot’s work as an artist.

Between newly composed music and fragmentary quotes from Schoenberg, blending opera, performance, installation, jazz gig, and concert, the project “A Murdered from Warsaw” is conceived as a music-theater hybrid with a premiere performance. The typically rigid dramaturgy of an opera is confronted with a second interpretative layer, where several variables, including an outdoor installation at the venue, a tour through the venue building, and the integration of improvisation, expand the scenic structure.

In addition to developing the libretto, Max Czollek will also perform on stage during the Berlin premiere.

Opern Call is an opera installation for the glass façade of the Akademie der Künste at Pariser Platz as well as for the entire premises of the Kölner Philharmonie. Freely accessible, the project includes twelve premieres by different composers who reconsider the 3rd and unfinished act of the opera Moses und Aaron by Arnold Schönberg.

With a libretto based on texts by Jo Frank and Ulrich Holbein, the project is conceived as a three-dimensional transformation of Schönberg's twelve-tone technique into public space and opens up the perspective of a specially developed site-specific opera format that seeks to combine analog and digital theater perception. Between opera performance and film, music-theatrical exhibition and audio walk, scenic exploration and newly composed music, a hybrid format emerges that can be experienced in analog form inside the Akademie der Künste and in digital-visual form outside.

Opern Call is the 2nd part of the multi-station project Die Harmonielehre. Further parts will be premiered in 2024 at the Kunstfest Weimar, the Musikfestival Bern and the Kölner Philharmonie.

Gefördert durch den Hauptstadtkulturfonds und die Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa Berlin.