Angst, the third opera by Christian Jost, was commissioned by Rundfunkchor Berlin. The work was premiered in 2006 at UltraSchall – The Festival for New Music. In an opera written expressly for them, Angst entrusts the Radio Chorus with carrying the weight of a music-dramatic story line.
A music-theatre piece for choir inherently precludes the possibility of resorting to classical dramaturgy calling for players and counter-players. For that, a system of 64 individual voices is too complex. It would no longer be a choir, whose members characteristically listen to one another and produce sounds collectively. There needed to be a theme which could be presented in chorus. A real-life mountain-climbing disaster that occurred in 1985 in the Peruvian Andes served as the model for a new choral form of music theatre.
Two British mountaineers came to grief after successfully becoming the first climbers to reach the summit of Siula Grande. During their descent in a storm, one of them fell and shattered his knee. His partner, hundreds of metres above him on the steep mountain face, was eventually forced to cut the hopelessly snagged support rope in order to save at least his own life, thereby violating one of the strictest of climbing taboos. Against all odds, both men were able to make it back to the base camp.
The drama of this disaster resides less in the external events, agonizingly drawn out and coming to a standstill for hours and days, than in the protagonists’ internal states: in their turmoil of doubts, thoughts, feelings and conflicts of conscience. “After some deliberation,” Jost explains, “I came to the realization that in a stressful situation every individual is thrust into a similar welter of diverse thoughts. Adrenalin plays a role in this. Different approaches and ideas occur to one, and it is sometimes difficult to steer them in the right direction. My approach was to make use of this variety of voices within a body, to make it sound, make it sing.” The scenic installation by Gottfried Pilz for the world premiere documented here creates a magical image for the inner world of thought: the 8 x 8 music stands glow in the dimly lit room like 64 brain cells. Stasis and dynamism, fleeting thoughts and nightmarish inertia balance one another in an interplay of elements comprising music, stage, singers, instrumentalists and film.
Angst consists of five sections, called gates by the composer. Through these gates the listener is led ever deeper through various layers into the interior of angst. The point of departure and return is the mountain climbers’ situation. The plunge of the injured man, who was left hanging over a 25-metre glacier crevasse, becomes the model for anxiety. There are no dramatis personae. Cry and reply, external and internal, I and you are all shoved against one another. Jost utilizes the flexibility of the choir, divided into as many as twelve parts, to evoke the contradictoriness of the perceptions, thoughts and emotions that batter the consciousness. The ten-member instrumental ensemble brings an objective impulse from the outside into this mêlée of voices.
Positioned between the two outer gates are three having a distancing function. They lead on from the archetypal point of departure and open up new horizons. In “Hölderlin”, a quiet madrigal for six solo voices a cappella based on his ode To the Fates, Jost allows the poet to speak. In classically controlled form, both cast a refined glance at the angst of creativity, beneath which lurks a fear of death. With the memory of childhood in “Kalt” (Cold), it is the subconscious psychological aspect of angst that comes under scrutiny. Childhood fears accompany people throughout their lives. Jost has given his gate the shape of a deformed cradle-song, which leads to the obsessively repeated sentence “Lass mich nie mehr allein” (“Never leave me alone again”). The singers have turned their music stands 90° and look one another in the eye. Each is dependent on the other.
“Amok” leads to the level of natural science by way of a chemical analysis of traumatic processes and a clinical report on the symptoms of a traumatized victim of torture. Speech and Sprechgesang, a type of enunciation intermediate between speech and song, represent objectifying attitudes to the texts. Their coldness tips over into the running amok of a Chechen suicide-assassin (alto solo), a so-called “Black Widow”, who here, however, represents the extreme consequences of traumatization.
With “Ab” (Down), the circle of this journey is closed. The content of “Ab” is a continuation of the first gate, “Fallen”, but now the theme is intensified in purely vocal form, purged of external, instrumental influences. “Ab” returns to the internal, psychic process. At the end, the supporting rope is severed. The journey leads to an experience of catharsis.
