Melusine

Madame Lapérouse has married off her daughter to her former lover, the estate agent Oleander. Melusine, however, refuses her husband’s approaches and spends most of her time in the mysterious park nearby. She learns from a surveyor that the park has been sold to Count Lusignan who plans to build a castle in it. Melusine beguiles the surveyor who succumbs to her charms and jumps to his death from the park wall. Melusine hopes to prevent the destruction of the park and seeks help from Pythia, a fortune teller, who reportedly lives in an old willow tree in the park and whom Melusine calls ‘Auntie’. Pythia gives her a fi shtail which she says will make Melusine irresistible to men. However, she warns Melusine to preserve her virginity, otherwise a fire will destroy her and the world of nature. Melusine seduces a mason who incites the other builders to go on strike, and then seduces an architect who falls so deeply in love with her that he loses his mind. The castle, however, is completed and is about to offi cially open. An ogre, the former park guard visits Pythia who sees that the only way now to prevent the park’s destruction is to send Melusine to the Count – when he falls in love with her, she can destroy him. She asks the ogre to protect Melusine so that she won’t fall victim to the Count’s aura and fall in love with him instead. The guests arrive, including Oleander and Melusine. The Count and Melusine fall in love. She sleeps with him. Pythia sets fore to the castle and Melusine runs into the inferno to save her love. Later, two charcoaled corpses are carried out of the smouldering ruins.

"To Reimann, romance and romanticism, as it‘s seen today, does not mean revelling in rapturous expression. Rather, he condenses the ambience into sensuous colourful sound surfaces, into characteristic colours fanned out like chamber music. Here, even more than in his fi rst opera Ein Traumspiel (after Strindberg), his characters are assigned to plastic sound forms. Melusine‘s predominantly lyrical-transient nature is evident in the fluctuating melis- mas which fragment the word into tonal figures of fantastic arpeggios […] All other protagonists were given short, concise and clearly depicted sound foils by Reimann in mostly episodic, often only spoken parts. They form the more distinct, musical-dramatic pole of tension in this eerie dreamworld." (G. A. Trumpf, Darmstädter Echo 29.10.1971, review of the Darmstadt production, season 1971/72)