Fürst Pückler – Ich bin ein Kind der Phantasie

The opera re-enacts the extravagant life and ideas of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, the nineteenth century visionary designer of landscape gardens and travel writer.
‘After visiting his Branitzer Park, Bernd Matzkowski and I realised that, analogous to Pückler’s division between a garden of life (Arkadia) and a garden of death (Elysium), our opera had to have two contrasting parts as well. In the first part you can listen to life being lived to the full: big ensemble acts and dancing rhythms dominate – waltzes, carrousel music, a Sorbian dance from the Lausitzer region – of course everything in an updated and modern style. In the second part we experience, after a change of gear via some oriental magic (Pückler, ever the flamboyant bird of paradise, spent some time in Africa and Arabia with his own harem), the gradual descent into pensiveness and the loneliness of parting. His friends and wives die and he broods over the meaning of human existence. Then silence. Exactly at this point, the grotesque, absurd, poetical life-affirming mood of the outset acquires the flair of “grand opera”: shadow turns into light and the thought of death becomes lifeaffirming. Pückler’s curious instructions for his own funeral bring about the grotesque spectacle that ends the opera: his dead body is chemically dissolved, and carried to the grave in a strange funeral procession (with military pomp, negros and dwarves).’ Enjott Schneider