Die Mutter

Pelagea Vlassova, a simple woman from the working class, realises that her son Pavel is beginning to become active in the Socialist movement and fight for better working conditions. She is gradually introduced to Socialist ideology by Pavel; she still however harbours doubts as to the legitimacy of his actions as she cannot overcome the contradiction between emotion and reason. Pavel undertakes an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the workers to strike. He is arrested together with his friend and comrade Andrei; the mother resolves to continue his work and smuggles leaflets into the factory. Pavel is arrested again while carrying the red flag at a May demonstration; the mother continues to carry the flag. She witnesses the torture of a comrade Rybin and distributes handbills of agitation to farmers’ wives, urging for resistance. Pavel is brought before court and his mother is also arrested slightly later.
Maxim Gorki‘s novel ‘The Mother’, written in 1906/07, provided Ingomar Grünauer with the plot for his ‘musical chamber play’ based on the dramatic tradition of the morality play in which his intention was to transpose the hopes prompting Gorki to create his literary agitation in 1907 into the present day. Grünauer compresses Gorki’s extensive novel into a structure of 22 scenes focused around the figure of the mother. Events and her fears and hopes are depicted from her viewpoint and compressed intensively. This strong focus is reinforced by a cinematic dramaturgy, permitting the individual scenes to unfold in sequence with no transitions, almost as though truncated by brutal cuts. The collective of the figures is characterised by the a cappella singing of the eleven soloists underpinned by the noisy percussion in trenchant rhythms. The voice of the mother is supported by a solo violin which – in a parallel to her growing political maturity and convictions – steadily increases in its intensity and melodic tension.