Bernhard Lang

Bernhard Lang is undoubtedly one of the most internationally significant, frequently performed and productive contemporary composers. After studying music, jazz, and composition with mentors such as Georg Friedrich Haas and Gösta Neuwirth, Lang spent most of the 1980s and early 1990s touring across Europe as a successful pianist, arranger, and improviser with several experimental jazz-rock bands. If you have not received our Bernhard Lang brochure yet, order a copy here!

Opera / “Musiktheater”

Der Reigen

In the highly comedic music-theatre Der Reigen (2014), Lang and librettist Michael Sturminger transport Der Reigen from its original setting in late nineteenth-century Vienna into the present day. In a cycle of ten short dialogues, Der Reigen shows equally as many sexual encounters between people from across all layers of society.

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"This is a stylistic specificity with which Lang provides punchlines and scenic climaxes." (Der Standard). Read the full review.

Der Hetzer

In Der Hetzer (2019), Verdi’s late-romantic opera becomes a forceful, jazz-infused political commentary on pressing current issues such as migration and ethnic bias. In the intervals between the four acts, the composer invites young, local talent to the stage and asks hip-hop artists, rappers, and DJs to comment on their own experiences with the opera’s central themes.

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"With a rewriting of Verdi's drama of jealousy, composer Bernhard Lang shows how opera can work today - for young audiences and for older ones. Both groups were enthusiastic after the world premiere of the 100-minute piece [...]."

Series

Cheap Opera

The Cheap Opera series, is a musical take on documentary filmmaking. In these works, the composer tackles current socio-political debates head on. Migration, the surge of populism, or invisible diseases – no subject is too sensitive for Lang when the mission is to raise awareness.


Read the composer's interview with Music Austria about composing the Cheap Opera series.

Differenz/Wiederholung

Differenz/Wiederholung contains over forty compositions, and new works are added on a regular basis. While all of them differ drastically in instrumentation, scale, and atmosphere, an explicit engagement with exact musical repetition and the limits thereof is what binds these works together.

Game

The series marks a radical departure from the composer’s prior engagement with post-structuralist philosophy. Instead, the starting point for this cycle of works is game theory: a subfield of mathematics which studies the strategic decision-making among participants in a competitive and strictly rule-based scenario.


Listen to a radio feature about the series, including composer commentary.

Monadologie

From Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to Chopin, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky: no historical work is off limits for Lang. In this series, the whole of music history is Lang’s playing ground.

Hermetika

In terms of philosophical inspiration, Hermetika marks a radical departure from the chronologically earlier series Differenz/Wiederholung and Monadologie. Instead of Deleuzian philosophy, the starting point for these works is an assorted collection of so-called “hermetic” texts.