Mauricio Kagel: Sur Scène (1959/1960)

Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008): chamber musical theatre piece in one act for speaker, mime, singer, and three instrumentalists. (1959/1960).

Alfred Feussner, speaker
Eduard Wollitz, singer
Alfons, Aloys, and Bernhard Kontarsky, instrumentalists.

Ensemble diretto da Mauricio Kagel.

Cover image: painting by Gerhard Richter.

The preliminary text of this "chamber music play" was drafted in 1958, and the work itself was composed in 1959- 1960 and premiered on 6 May 1962 during the "pro musica nova" festival on a commission from Bremen Radio. In more than a chronological sense it was written in close proximity to the choral piece "Anagrama" (1957-58). "Sur Scene" is dominated by the excessively artificial and absurd aspects of "Anagrama". Four processes are presented synchronously by six men. The Speaker is even comprehensible in his declamations, though only acoustically. As Kagel explains, an "ad hoc logic" is used not only to "compose thought-articulations" but also to "create a confusion of simple facts or banal comments". Yet this text is a collage drawn from literary sources. The Speaker is also the Actor, appearing first as a music professor, then as a scientist and a cultural philosopher. The task of the musical and mimetic modulations in the speech, Kagel maintains, is to highlight not "the meaning of the text - semantic adaptation" but rather the "utter ambiguity of role behaviour and the universe of discourse". And if the montage technique destroys any possible meaning in the text it does so twice over by its acoustical presentation, producing an effect of total alienation. Five different levels of pitch, volume and duration are indicated for reciting the speech. The audience hears not only speech-melody, at times multiplied by tapes, but also a "de-naturalization" of language.

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