“After 54 years, I heard my ‘Traumspiel’ just as I had imagined it!” – Aribert Reimann on the Hof performance

Ein Traumspiel (A Dream Play) – Aribert Reimann's first opera – is finally available on CD, in the production by the Hof Theater that was enthusiastically acclaimed by critics and opera audiences alike.

Vocal music is a central element of Aribert Reimann’s compositional output, and literature plays an equally central role for him as a source of dramatic impulse, inspiration, and subject matter – as well as providing an opportunity for creative friction and musical transformation. Reimann’s compositions for the voice – from unaccompanied solo pieces to opera – are almost always settings of literary texts.

The visually stunning Traumspiel captivates from the very first note with its melodic diversity and intensity. Aribert Reimann succeeds in bringing the underlying theme of August Strindberg's play, compassion, to life in a sensual way, and at the end gives Indra's daughter a gift package of human worries, sufferings, and complaints, tied up with masterful music, to take with her to the afterlife to the god Indra.

In addition to August Strindberg, Reimann was also inspired by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, although he takes a completely different musical approach to Rilke's first “Duino Elegy”: in his composition Denn Bleiben ist nirgends (For to Stay is to be Nowhere), he combines the text, recited by a speaker, with a symphony orchestra playing in a broad, expansive style to create a melodrama. Herein, the music corresponds to Rilke’s poetic text that – according to Reimann in his notes on the work – “justifies the development of an independent piece of music and is not simply the point of departure for subsidiary background music.” The result is “a constant exchange, in which the expressive impulses sometimes come from the language and are taken up by the music, or vice versa, until each becomes the instrument of the other.”

Cast (Ein Traumspiel):
- Indra’s Daughter: Franziska Rabl (mezzo-soprano)
- The Officer: Karsten Jesgarz (tenor)
- The Lawyer: James Tolksdorf (baritone)
- The Poet: Marek Reichert (baritone)