Melancholia

Melancholia has, across centuries and cultures, borne the most diverse and contradictory attributions: a bodily affliction and a state of contemplation; a way of transcending earthly suffering and a sister to genius. In Melencolia I, Albrecht Dürer placed an equally enigmatic polyhedron at its center that has come to symbolize these contradictions and the sense of the unsolvable that lies at the heart of humanity’s desire for salvation.

The world premiere Melencolia explores these tensions in sound. An opera conceived as a hypertext made space: A field in which sources of sound, light, body and image establish themselves as elemental particles, continually recombining in an ongoing process of transformation. Through a musical language that is playful yet rigorous in its engagement with stereotypes drawn from Renaissance, Romanticism, pop and the exaggerated, this work of music theater embarks on a search for the liberating melancholic mood.

Ensemble Modern