Beat Furrer: Wüstenbuch

The desert is a place for strangers. It is an image of ungraspable emptiness, a metaphor for death and nothingness, onto which we repeatedly project our fears of losing our memories. Numerous authors have written about the phenomenon of the desert. Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Wüstenbuch-Fragmente”, taken from her “Todesarten-Projekt”, is a striking example. Beat Furrer and Händl Klaus have incorporated passages of them into the textual outline of their new music theatre piece Wüstenbuch.

Beat Furrer: “Three people are travelling through Egypt today. In their search for its origins they encounter their own desert in the form of an absence of memory, the phantasmagoria of their own memories and ultimately, in the final scene, on a very elementary level: a reflection of a utopia of human existence, a just society: ‘We are silent, without shelter and fear. (…) We have eaten from the same plate. We have shared and not prayed, sent nothing back, not left a bean, taken nothing away, pre-empted nothing, stinted nothing.’ (Ingeborg Bachmann) … The music presents a perspective on these textual fragments while allowing them to speak in their own strangeness.”

Further building blocks of the libretto are provided by texts by Händl Klaus, Antonio Machado and Lucretius together with ancient Egyptian papyrus 3024, in which an unknown author wrote of his longing for death. The Papyrus is quoted in the new translation by Jan Assmann, who caused a sensation with his book “Tod und Jenseits im Alten Ägypten” (“Death and Beyond in Ancient Egypt”), collecting numerous death texts and thereby making a decisive contribution to our understanding of the Ancient Egyptians’ relationship with death, and the congruence of death ritual with the celebration of life.

Wüstenbuch, music theatre for a small orchestra, singers and spoken voices in a production by the director Christoph Marthaler, who has already staged Beat Furrer’s music theatre works Fama (2005) and invocation (2003) is commissioned by Theater Basel, MaerzMusik | Berliner Festspiele and Wiener Festwochen, and will receive its German premiere at MaerzMusik.

19:00 | Introduction
Marie Luise Maintz talks to Beat Furrer and Jan Assmann