Bernhard Lang, ParZeFool. Daniel Gloger, Magdalena Anna Hofmann, Wolfgang Bankl, Tómas Tómasson, Arnold Schoenberg Chor, Klangforum Wien, Simone Young. Kairos, 2019. [Album review]

Abstract

It seems a bit incongruous that a composer who came from the world of improvisational jazz would become closely and tirelessly occupied with the operatic stage, but by now, as his own biographical blurb makes clear, Bernhard Lang must be considered primarily as a composer of music theatre. To be sure, he got off to an extremely auspicious start: Das Theater der Wiederholung is one of the most extraordinary demonstrations of what dramatically-inclined New Music is capable of. It is also, with its combination of texts from Sade, Burroughs and witness testimony from the Nürenberg trials, almost uniquely unappealing to anyone with administrative oversight of a performance venue. Lang’s subsequent operas have been less starkly iconoclastic, but no less ambitious in their dedication to a dramatic realisation of his evolving Deleuzean and Leibnizian aesthetic preoccupations, which have been extensively worked out in his Differenz/Wiederholung (now simply DW) and Monadologie series; elsewhere, he describes his dramatic output seemingly in toto as ‘the series of the “Theatre of Repetitions”’. All of Lang’s music theatre works are deceptively literary and visceral, involved in digging up overdetermined bits of aesthetic history, blowing them up and re-embalming them again and again. It’s not completely unexpected, then, that he might get around to setting his sights of Wagner’s Parsifal sooner or later. [excerpt]