Michael Kohlhaas

The hero of the opera, Michael Kohlhaas, possesses a compulsive sense of justice at all costs despite his own wrongdoings which bring catastrophe on himself and others. He is ultimately successful in his original claim for justice which he addressed to the emperor, even though this results in the death sentence for his actions. Thomas Mann once described the relentless dramaturgy of Kleist’s novella as follows: ‘At the end, readers have the oppressive feeling that God has made a misjudgement.’

In this work, I experiment with a special narrative music theatre model in which only Kohlhaas is sung by a tenor throughout the drama whereas the other 13 roles are undertaken alternately by a baritone and a mezzo-soprano. All three ‘protagonists’ are simultaneously narrators who also recite texts from the novella, but these texts can also be undertaken by actors. Both variants result in an epic balladesque structure.

The instrumentation of the orchestra for the two-act opera (with no interval) exactly corresponds to Beethoven’s classical orchestra. Leitmotifs allotted to each of the individuals guide the audience systematically through the work. Stefan Heucke