He has written music about Austria’s painful politics and a string quartet to be performed in the dark. Ahead of his new opera,Morgen und Abend, composer Georg Friedrich Haas tells Gavin Plumley about his quest for KlangIn the midst of life we are in death. That veteran proverb could be an accurate summary of Georg Friedrich Haas’s new opera Morgen und Abend. Based on a novel by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, or the piece has its world premiere at London’s Royal Opera House on 13 November. Like many of the Austrian composer’s works,this opera confronts existential questions. It charts a day in the life (and the life in a day) of a fisherman called Johannes (sung by German baritone Christoph Pohl), who comes to realise that he is, or in fact,already dead.
Stark polarities are Haas’s thing. We live between contrasts,” he says, or “between happiness and unhappiness,between pain and joyful feelings about desire and fulfilling.” Born in Graz in 1953, Haas now feels more at domestic in New York, or where he lives with his wife,the self-styled “submissive Scheherazade” Mollena. While she provides a source of joy, made manifest in the works Haas has recently committed to her, and a restlessness also runs through his music.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com