Staud: Berenice (Revision 2006)

My first full-length work is based on the arabesque Berenice, published in 1835 by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). This dark horror story revolves around the unequal, incestuous marriage of Egaeus and Berenice, facing each other like archetypal opposites. The underlying horror at the heart of the piece comes out from human anatomy, the human soul. It plays out, like so much of Poe’s work, on the threshold between daily life and the world of nightmares.

Strings of variations arise from the most varied seeds of inspiration, constantly combining and recombining, and developing gradually into an almost inescapable tangle of relationships, in which unexpected trapdoors and dead ends threaten to open up at any minute. Sung passages are interspersed with the spoken passages, underlining the schizophrenic separation of the role of Egaeus between a singer and an actor. This also heightens the contrast with the fragile figure of Berenice.

An eight-voice vocal ensemble playing the choir of family ghosts commentates on the action as if in a Greek tragedy, with a range of expressions from whispers to shouts. Minor characters like the Dead Mother are recruited from the vocal ensemble, the performers momentarily escaping from the shadows of anonymity. The musical basis of the whole piece is a lightly amplified harmonium and five electronically generated spatial sound patterns based on the sounds of metalworking machines. The aim was not to integrate these electronic textures into the rest of the work, but rather to replicate a sonic idea which would not have been possible with voices or instruments alone.

(Johannes Maria Staud)