Trio

Bernhard reacts with increasing despair and aggression towards Judith, the sister of his wife Madeleine. The married couple had taken the depressed Judith into their home to provide her with support. Now Judith appears to have independently discontinued her treatment. She has changed her doctor, no longer takes her medication which she thinks she does not tolerate and suffers from imagined loneliness and isolation although Bernhard and Madeleine have done everything possible to incorporate her into their circle of friends. When Bernhard and Madeleine speak to each other in the garden underneath Judith’s window, Judith misinterprets the situation: she fears that Bernhard is threatening her sister with violence and kills him.
This family drama on an irrevocable path towards catastrophe depicted by Reinhard Stenzel in five laconic scenes which only casually appear to mirror the action in the dialogue are set to highly expressive music by Volker M. Plangg. In shimmering tonal patterns, shrill and shrieking wind sequences and a piercing accentuation in the percussion section, the music generates an atmosphere of constantly increasing menace and cumulative agitation, thereby creating an additional psychological level of interpretation above the terse and tense narrative style of the libretto.