In April Liza Lim’s opera Tree of Codes was premiered to great critical acclaim in Cologne: “A major contribution to the music theatre of our time“ (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik), „tender sensuality“ (FAZ), “an exciting discovery in the music theatre world” (Deutschlandradio).

PRESS QUOTES

„tender sensuality“ (FAZ, 12.04.2016)
„Liza Lim’s music is remarkably innovative in the way it finds and combines sounds. Some parts have a great density in their structure while other parts are full of heart and easily accessible” (Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 11.04.2016)
„an exciting discovery in the music theatre world, smartly structured and extremely sensual” (Deutschlandradio Kultur, 09.04.2016)
„music that is full of varieties and rich in color“ (Die Deutsche Bühne, 10.04.2016)
„tremendously colorful“ (Rheinische Post, 10.04.2016)
“a major contribution to the music theatre of our time“ (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, May 2016)
 „the whole thing is definitely worth a visit“ (VAN Magazin, 13.04.2016)

INTERVIEW

Do you have any role models if it comes to opera?

Again, I have diverse examples – the choreographer William Forsythe’s Heterotopia (one of the most extraordinary contemporary “operatic” works in my opinion where the dancers vocalize and  physically wrestle with language as matter) and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde which occupied me very much when I was writing my previous opera, The Navigator. The Forsythe work for its sense of perpetual becoming; Wagner for sheer erotic immersion.

What gave you the idea for the opera Tree of Codes?

Tree of Codes is based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same name, which he made by filtering a number of short stories by Polish writer Bruno Schulz from the collection Street of Crocodiles (1934, also known as Cinnamon Shops). I actually wrote a work for Ensemble Modern in 1995 called Street of Crocodiles – a chamber work with multiple personages. It was a response to the morphing magical intensity of the stories.

The potential for making an opera based on this world of figures and ideas had therefore been with me for quite a long time. But it was seeing the incredible ”cut-out” structure of the Safran Foer book where one can read through several layers of pages, glimpsing a changing architecture of words and meanings that really blew me away when I bought the book at Christmas time in 2010.

The subtitle of your opera is »Cut-cuts in time«. What does this mean?

Just as the book Tree of Codes is made up of a patchwork of spaces through which one can see different parts of the narrative so that present and future collide, the opera is also made up of different kinds of time-zones, heterogeneous time-realities that co-exist beyond the normal linear calendar. I had this idea to make a work in which there are holes in the world, perforations in which one might encounter multiple realities.

There is the primeval time of birds with which the work begins, which is not really natural but a manufactured hybrid world of bird-like humans and human-like birds existing in some strange laboratory. There is a dream-like and also brutal carnival world, a midden or archaeological trash heap of masks and floating desires. These masks or identities are tried on, discarded, reclaimed, or repurposed. In a suspended zone, there’s the central character of the father, who is dead but doesn’t know it. He tries to create reality, conjuring things out of rubbish. He commands with gestures but he doesn’t speak. Others speak for him so he’s like a puppeteer who is himself like a ventriloquist’s puppet.

What is the story about? What is the general topic?

Well there are a few stories but I’m hoping different people will see different things… If there’s a ”story”, it is about the basic ephemerality that attends our lives and our deaths and a longing for intensity, iridescence, for epiphany.

Please tell us something about the protagonists of the opera.

There are three main singing parts: the Mutant Bird played by the clarinetist of Ensemble Musikfabrik, Carl Rosman – he sings, he warbles like a bird, he triggers sampled sounds, he plays clarinets – a “suprahuman” musician that bridges multiple worlds! Then there is the Son, played by baritone Christian Miedl, and Adela, figure of desire and fascination to both the Son and the Father, played by soprano Emily Hindrichs.

Both these singing parts are highly lyrical and then also turn into something darker, more bestial. This inversion of the lyrical is found especially in the 3rd Act, “Ventriloquism” which is made up of two big “ballads”. Adela’s ballad begins as a kind of triple-time lullaby accompanied by the plucked kalimba (thumb piano). She sings “Let me tell you a story” like the retelling of a folk fairy-tale. But the story becomes stranger and stranger, unfolding into a nocturnal landscape with the sounds of frogs and insects that eventually rasp out Goethe’s horrifying lines from Der Erlkönig – about the Son who cannot be kept safe by the Father.

Then there’s a weird sea shanty for the Son accompanied by a solo bassoon - a rocking boat song that talks about madness, about death as a masked animal, the soul without compass in an abandoned craft, lost and at the mercy of the sea. Different parts of the opera play with song conventions that might start out with a familiar element, which then become something else.

The Father doesn’t speak or sing and is played by the actor Yael Rion. There are also doubles of the Son and Adela played by performers from the theatre company Numero23. Prod, Stéphane Vecchione and Anne Delahaye, and another actor, Touya (Diane Decker), is a figure of fecund decay who personifies the landscape of overripe sensuality. All the musicians are also on stage, not only playing, but also vocalizing and singing as a choir and they form part of the crowd of characters that inhabit the laboratory, the city, the stage. By the end, everyone is singing and that’s another example of the dissolving of boundaries between performers that takes place in the work.