photo gallery
The performance of the Kreutzer Sonata/ Expectation (Erwartung) combines two themes in which human desire passes through to death.
They do not define violence as a form of pain, but through a kind of depressing mystery. Both stories portray mutually suffering people.
The performance works with Beethoven’s musical motif of Tolstoy’s novel of the same name. In his story, the victim is a woman, a wife and a mother, whose life ends her husband under the influence of the inability to understand a woman as an individual being. The story of the monodrama Expectation is an inverse interweaving of the motif of Tolstoy’s work. It tells about a woman who suspects her partner of infidelity and finds him already killed. Schönberg combines the psychoanalytic starting points brought by the plot itself with strong expressiveness and with an expressionist vision.
As writes in his study of the work Miloslav Blahynka; „Freudian is the basic starting state of this woman. He longs for pleasure and love, but cannot achieve them. This collision becomes an expression of strong internal tension, which is the cause of neuroses. In the psychopathology of ordinary life, Freud revealed the function of the phenomenon of displacement in such contexts. What if, we can legitimately ask in this context, the relationship of a woman to a dead lover is an expression of the mentioned phenomenon of displacement.“
The victim of violence in the Kreutzer Sonata/Expectation project is thus able to reflect due to the influence of internal analysis.
But is it just her dream when she imagines a man who is no longer alive? Does this kind of dreaming and analysis help her?
Or is it the dream of the man in Tolstoy’s story, who sees himself as dead…
What is left of their relationship?
Music: Arnold Schoenberg
Concept, directing, scenography, singing: Peter Mazalán, Eva Šušková
Soundart, music: Stroon, Peter Pažický (piano)
Lighting design: Jozef Čabo, Martin Ondrejka
Baroque chamber ensemble
Duration: 60 min
Premiere:
Slovak National Theatre: 3th and 4th of Juny 2022 / 20:00