Jot oder Wann kommt der Herr zurück

‚Any performance of this work is only a provisional realisation. The first performance and world premiere in Berlin should be considered as a first version’. This comment appearing in the Deutsche Oper programme for the first performance and world premiere in Berlin provides a fitting characterisation of the work according to the intentions of the composer and his librettist Philip Oxman: an artistic experiment, a work in progress, comparable with the art happenings of Fluxus and Fernando Arrabal’s theatre of the absurd. There is no plot: in adherence to Huber’s intentions, Oxman has compiled a loose collage of text fragments. Textual elements from the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung on the subject of dreams and interpretation of dreams are combined with quotations from the Communist manifesto of Karl Marx, extracts from Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ and verses from the Christian Bible, interspersed with ancient writings of the Church Fathers, the Kabbala and contemporary theoreticians of ecclesiastical architecture. Different languages are utilised in correspondence to the pattern of the collage: German, English, Old and Middle High German and Medieval Latin are employed as appropriate in their phonetic possibilities of expression.
Huber’s music corresponds to this pattern of apparent randomness through the avant-garde free utilisation of heterogenic styles and elements: he combines vocal cantilenas – although deliberately devoid of meaning – with classical counterpoint, Baroque references, dance music collages and everyday sounds, forming an imaginative tonal mixture which plays skilfully with the expectations of the listener.