Wolfgang Rihm
Das Gehege

Can music convey political conviction? Wolfgang Rihm thought not: “If I were to say that the chord in bar 44 has this or that historical significance for Germany,” he said, “then you would consider me crazy.” But it is difficult not to regard Rihm’s monodrama Das Gehege as political. Rihm set the text of the third act of Botho Strauß’s play Schlußchor word for word in his “nocturnal scene”, and Strauß had given the act a very specific historical date: 9 November 1989. The scene plays out in a Berlin café. While the borders are opening for the citizens of the GDR, the play’s protagonist Anita von Schastorf gains insights into her own origins. Her father was a German officer executed by the Nazis, but in retrospect, his resistance appears ambivalent. Rihm’s Das Gehege begins with the last scene of Strauß’ play: Anita does not follow the crowds on the streets, but instead goes to the zoo, where she had already observed an ageing eagle during the day. In the darkness of the night, she returns to the bird, talks to it, takes a knife from her handbag and cuts a hole in its cage. When the eagle fails to take advantage of its chance of freedom, Anita makes erotic advances. She challenges the eagle, teasing and taunting it. The raptor approaches gradually, and finally leaps towards her. Will it actually attack? Anita does not wait to find out. She kills the bird.

Strauß’s 1991 play Schlußchor juxtaposed the jubilation of German reunification with a darkly ironic dystopia. “I was captivated by the text and the setting,” confessed Rihm, who saw the play on stage for the first time in 1992. “The woman is suddenly alone in front of this creature, which is also has a mythological form. It made me cry. This was theatre that was already growing into a kind of musical language.” When conductor Kent Nagano asked Rihm for a one-act opera to precede Richard Strauss’ opera Salome for his inauguration as General Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera in 2006, the composer decided in favour of the final scene of Schlußchor because, he explained, it depicts a woman “who enters into a relationship with an eagle, offers herself to it erotically in a variety of ways, and finally consumes it.” To Rihm, this echoed the figure of Salome, who also kills the object of her desire. He was interested in the “abysmal ambivalences” that Das Gehege shares with Salome: the deadly interplay between freedom and dependence.

Rihm plays with musical set-pieces which wink at music history. Exaggerated march rhythms, languorous waltzes, references to Beethoven’s Ninth and even the Deutschlandlied are enigmatically “secreted” (Rihm) in the score. In the musical foreground, however, is Anita’s eroticised power play, in which she sometimes coos, sometimes yearns, sometimes mocks and provokes. This disturbing game of lust is interrupted three times by a “blackout” in Botho Strauß’s work. What happens during these interludes is not illuminated by the writer. Rihm has filled the gaps: Here he makes audible not only the soaring trajectory of the eagle, but also Anita’s spiralling descent through aggression and ecstasy to brutal violence and its abrupt end.