In his earlier works, the Berlin-based Russian composer Sergej Newski has often made use of documentary texts and socially relevant political subjects. Once again in his documentary opera Die Einfachen (2020/2021), he utilizes rediscovered letters to a famous psychiatrist in which workers, lower-level employees and students write about their homosexuality in post-Revolutionary Leningrad in the 1920s. Newski’s opera Secondhand-Zeit (2018-2019) ), commissioned by the Stuttgart Staatsoper and based on the novel Second-Hand Time by the Belarusian Nobel prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich, is a “prose documentary made up of the life stories of many who have been left behind” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) by “progress” in the period of post-Soviet upheaval. His newest vocal work, Eyewitness Evidence, also joins this tradition when Newski reacts musically to a text about the horrors of war, “attempting to describe the indescribable”. Klangforum Heidelberg presents the world premiere on 23.10.2022, two days after the Asasello Quartett premieres Newskis fourth string quartet in Cologne.

In interviews and other forums, Newski regularly expresses his views on the current (cultural-) political situation in Russia, allowing voices critical of Putin and the Kremlin to be heard.

Happy birthday, dear Sergej!

Eyewitness Evidence (2022)

for five voices and percussion

23.10.2022 (WP)
Klangforum Heidelberg, Festival "Die Würde - wessen?", HebelHalle Heidelberg

About Eyewitness Evidence

The poem by the young Russian author Dmitry Gerchikov (b. 1996) was written in May 2022 and has a very clear structure. It comprises 39 sentences, all constructed according to the same principal and all beginning with the words “War has that face”. I divided this text into three sections of 13 sentences and made a kind of strophic song with instrumental interludes between the strophes. For me, the simplicity and clarity of the piece’s form was perhaps the only possible reaction to the content of the text, which attempts to describe the indescribable.

Poem by Dmitry Gerchikov

this is the war's face: a woman b. 1963
with a ribbon of bruises on her neck
this is the war's face: a child b. 2010
in a soaked, torn jacket
this is the war's face: a man b. 1979
his tattooed hands tied
this is the war’s swollen face: a person b. 1951
with abdominal wounds
this is the war's familiar face b. 1990
with a new stylish haircut
this is the war’s wrinkled face: a person b. 1947
clutching a phone in their hands
this is the war's youthful face b. 2000
with cigarette burns
this is the war's elderly face b. 1937
stained with coal and blood
this is the war's likeable face b. 1989
with the front teeth knocked out
this is the war's face: your best friend b. 1996
unrecognisable now
this is the war's face reflected in the mirror
in 2001 when you had a nightmare
this is the war's face staring from a photograph
in your own passport issued in 2014
this is the war's face: your loved one b. 1991
you wanted to have children with
this is the war's face: an unidentified person with PTSD b. 1966
who went to the same school
this is the war's face: an unidentified person with diabetes b. 1970
he worked in a plumbing store nearby
this is the war's face: an unidentified person b. 1999
with a speech impediment
yesterday he and his family flew up into the sky in a rocket
this is the war's face: an unidentified trans-person b. 1983
the earth swallowed him up
this is the war's face: an unidentified LGBT-person b. 1955
on the spectrum
this is the war's face: an expert b. 1976
with a Molotov cocktail instead of a beer
this is the war's face: a PhD student b. 1988
she cannot walk anymore
this is the war's face: a nurse b. 1961
with a big scar on her chest
this is the war's face: a teenager b. 2012
sick with dysentery
this is the war's face: a newswoman b. 1960
in chemotherapy
this is the war's face: a new-born girl b. 2022
they buried her yesterday
this is the war's face: an activist b. 2015
war entered her life
this is the war's face: a teacher b. 1935
war entered her death
this is the war's face: a schoolgirl b. 2002
who lost her mother b. 1956
this is the war's face: a doctor b. 1956
whose son b. 2001 went to war
this is the war's face: an artist b. 1993
who married an artist b. 1994
this is the war's face: a veterinarian b. 1949
whose house burnt down
this is the war's face: a musician b. 1972
dying of thirst in a basement
this is the war's face: a migrant b. 1968
in his orange uniform
this is the war's face: a carpenter b. 1984
who moved here for work
this is the war's face: a construction worker b. 1970
staying in this country illegally
this is the war's face: a ginger cow b. 2012
from the neighboring village
this is the war's face: a cat b. 2016
who was left under the rubble
this is the war's face: a dog b. 2014
sniffing on a fresh corpse
this is the war's face: rusty water
from a water pipe on the edge of town
this is the war's face: fire
that came down from the skies

Score of Eyewitness Evidence