Bernhard Lang: Cheap Opera #3 ‘May’

This music theatre is based on the writings, drawings and concepts of May Kooreman–an architect and writer suffering from Parkinson’s disease. In a rhizomatic journey through these texts, the music attempts to trace the effects and side effects of Parkinson’s disease on the mind of a creative person.

 

In Mays own words:

»We are all human, we have relationships,

we experience birth, illness, and death.

Why is my life with Parkinson’s so different?

What is there to tell? Aren’t my experiences ultimately universal?

Doesn’t everyone feel lonely and lost sometimes?

We all bring our own fears, beliefs, and preferences.

There is no single truth about Parkinson’s;

it is my perception alongside yours.«

 

The libretto attempts a new approach to documentary textuality by replacing the fictional narrative with the narrative of the real. The music is interpreted by a core ensemble reduced to the bare essentials: The voices are to devote themselves to the text, alternating between speaking, chanting, singing, whispering–always clearly intelligible.

The instrumental ensemble is small, reduced to the essentials, as is the vocal ensemble: three voices that weave their way through these texts and their poetic, hallucinatory, and philosophical effects.

 

Parkinson’s raises questions of perception, identity, death, and life, all from the perspective of a mind affected by this disease.

(Bernhard Lang)