Blutbund

An innkeeper engages the help of a procuress to marry her daughter to a rich old man. The girl resists this union with all her might to prove that she has the exclusive right to have control over her own body. She enters into a blood bond with a scissors grinder who happens to be passing by: through this exchange of blood, she has symbolically concluded the cycle of life and has thereby expressed her wish to live with the scissors grinder. Shortly afterwards, when the rich old man slips into the girl’s room, she stabs him with a pair of scissors and throws his body out of the window with the aid of the scissors grinder.
The ‘Mystery Play for Silhouettes’ by the Spanish author Ramón del Valle-Inclán first performed in 1926, is a set of variations in a Surrealist dramatic style on the destruction of social, moral, religious and verbal conventions. The concept of the shadow play was deliberately chosen to avoid any form of identification by the observer with the protagonists; the plot unfolds on an elevated abstract-artistic level. Hans-Jürgen von Bose‘s music takes up this principle of excessive artificiality. Constantly changing time signatures and rhythmic displacements generate an undetermined, weightless inner turmoil in correspondence to the fragmented treatment of the texts and instrumental style of the vocal lines, aptly demonstrated in the ‘masking’ of the procuress who is sung by a tenor in an extremely high register.