Bitef

can only function when the audience is there and "communes" with the elements of the piece. The work is then probably much more individual and richly imaginative than we could have planned it to be. Stifters Dinge definitely needs an audience. Only the watchful eye can make a play out of it. What could interest a composer such as yourself, previously deeply engaged with the apocalyptic and catastrophe-loving Heiner Müller, in the Biedermeier dreamer Adalbert Stifter? Dreams disappoint. Reading the description of the forest in My Great Grandfather's Portfolio you'd think that Heiner Müller had studied it before writing Herakles 2, The interesting thing with Stifter is that the subjects and his treatment of them retreat in the face of other forces (take for example the description of the ice storm and the hail storm). If you're only waiting for the description to finally come to an end then of course it's dull -that's how I experienced it at school. However, once you begin to get interested in the elements that remain unknown, what Stifter calls "things", then the text can be extremely exciting. Theatre tends towards psychology, reducing themes, conflicts and experiences to the relationship between two poles. I believe that there is more that is often left to one side.

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