Zaïde / Adama

In the year 1779 Mozarts Zaïde posed the question about the possibilities of a dialogue between the Occident and the Orient. This Singspiel is a kind of tragic version of Die Entführung aus dem Serail which has a happy and merciful ending and once again emphatically invokes the spirit of the Enlightenment. Zaïde was never completed and exists only as a fragment. The overture, the dialogues and the finale are all missing and the outcome of the story remains unclear.

The Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin has reacted to this. In her work Adama(Hebrew: adama = earth, adam = man, dam = blood) she composes an independent musical sound space and regards the subject from a contemporary perspective. Whereas Zaïde describes the conflict between the civilisations using the story of a European couple who are in love and who are held in slavery in an alien Oriental country, the situation as described by Czernowin is intensified, touches on the question of freedom and imprisonment from a different dimension. The lovers themselves speak two languages and encounter each other as foreigners, as a man from Palestine and an Israeli woman.

Adama is therefore not the completion of a Mozart fragment and the overall project Zaïde / Adama is not a closed entirety. Through Adama it is much more a matter of trying to find corresponding and contradictory features in an incomplete historical work. The various musical spheres are interwoven and enter a dialogue. This interplay of sound opens up the possibility of hearing each different musical cosmos with purified ears and of perhaps discovering unforeseen common features.

- Abridged from the Salzburg Festival programme