Opera for Four Buses: Deconstruction of a Great Idea

Dorothea Kolland

I must confess, I love opera.
I was so glad that the opera houses had not been blown up during my youth, and that the end of the opera, as declared, did not occur. I belong to those who want to keep all four opera houses in Berlin (naturally four, including the Neuköllner Oper). I am also quite in favour of building a new, completely separate facility for avant-garde musical theatre; then we would have five opera houses. In any case, I would like to see a change or two to the programme. I am sure that opera is nowhere near its end, because it continues to show an infinite variety of possibilities for development.

I love the multifaceted dimensions of this genre and the opportunities for the development of sensuality, which opera provides. However, I also love the challenging, the peculiar, and a testing of limits. So I was immediately enchanted by Gisela Weimann's idea for a ‘Bus Opera,’ even if this completely toyed with my expectations of opera, because nothing would remain of the traditional combination of music, theatre, images, space and a story. What was happening here was the deconstruction of a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk,’ or a total work of art, anchored in the European canon to declare Wagner’s idea as ‘pars pro toto.’

Here is what occurred: The visual artist Gisela Weimann broke opera down into its separate components – not without ironic, ulterior motives, although it would be a mistake to only understand her work as an ironic comment on an important art form. She assigned different functions to these parts and reassembled them in a completely new way. What resulted was not a new musical work with a clear compositional style, but rather a temporary, spatial sculpture, playing with time, incorporating the participation of many artistic styles – Gisela Weimann's own, those of the composers, as well as the brilliantly conducted driving of the bus drivers. In four acts, each of which takes on the realistic appearance of the buses, the public, the singers, the orchestra pit and the theatre were crammed together. The traditional stage setting detached itself from its concrete space and whizzed past the windows of the bus. Its perception, however, was controlled by mirrors and reflections on the windows of the buses, which maintained the barriers between inside and outside. This concept of the deconstruction of opera, coupled with the confused sense of perception through the reflections, was really the most interesting aspect of this operatic event, which most absolutely can be described as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk.’

Gisela Weimann's idea is astounding. She looked for four composers (as a citizen of the world, she chose people of different cultural and artistic backgrounds) and for four buses (which were harder to find than the composers). She got each of the composers enthusiastic about writing a 15 minutes long work, within a chamber music or soloist setting, and allowing for instrumental, vocal and electronic music. She then dressed the buses and musicians in mirrors and sent the four buses on their way, each with their four musical loads and with a quarter of the audience. At four crossover points the passengers changed buses. The order of the music to be experienced is not fixed. This means that each audience group will experience a different ‘work.’ This aleatory conception makes its impossible to construct a tension that goes beyond the separate acts, as the individual compositions have no connection to one another.

Georg Katzer, the fifth composer, succeeded in providing the musical coupling with his leitmotif composition Motorenlied (Engine Song). Electronically alienated sounds of engines, which greet visitors when embarking on a journey to another country, are intermittently mixed with the actual engine noises of the approaching, circling and braking buses as well as the separate compositions.

The "Russian Bus" was musically and physically arranged by Natalia Pschenitschnikova and Maacha Deubner with songs and noises that stir up associations of Russian Orthodox church music. Tubes hanging from the ceiling resembled operating theatres and provoked fears of resuscitation attempts, rather more than they fulfilled any intended acoustic function.

The ”German Bus,” with music by Friedrich Schenker, was more ornate. Goethefaustzweischnittchen (Goethefausttwoslices) was delivered by the vivacious Italian singer Anna Clementi and two tuba players. Weimann's deconstruction of opera was matched by Schenker’s brilliant deconstruction of the popular classic text, which were quickly and intensely flung at one’s head like the punch lines in a good cabaret.

The ”Finnish Bus”, naturally enough, was a narration of Schnee, Wald und Meer (Snow, Forest and Sea), and was brought to Berlin by Patrick Kosk. He converted the whole bus into a drum. Apart from strange imports, all the pipes, rails and other hard materials were used to produce sounds, and were also distorted by live electronics.

The finale for me, the ”English Bus 2," was masterfully filled with sounds by a bass clarinettist and a vocalist. Based on texts by the Irishman John Montague(1) and the Indian Sujata Bhatt(2), it was a reflection upon cultural variety and its suppression, identity and dominant cultures. The performance was directly related to the narrow bus's spatial and acoustic possibilities, revealing at the same time the infinity of world culture and not allowing for any fake reconciliation through standardisation.

It is unlikely that all of the bus acts will go on to serve as examples of world culture in the great concert halls of the world, but this is not decisive when analysing the ”Bus Opera.” What is important is that Weimann thinks and works on a European level, giving a voice to the national mosaic stones that make up Europe. What I found exciting on this late August evening was the night-time drive through the backyards – the ‘service entrances’ of Berlin’s Museumsinsel (Museum Island) – and the discovery of a world, which is otherwise hidden.

What was particularly important and exciting was Gisela Weimann's attempt to turn opera on its head, to take it apart, redistribute the roles and functions, and to reassemble it. The ”Bus Opera” is part of her work series Spiegelungen (Reflections). In the same way that she works with actual mirrors, bits of mirror, distorting mirrors, rear-view mirrors, reflections of the mirror and reflections of reality, until one no longer knows what is reflected reality and what is a mirror, in this opera she has reflected upon and deconstructed her own work as well as the operatic form. She in no way destroys one of the lighthouses of European musical culture, but rather, by using her all-embracing distorting mirror, she sets fantasies in motion, which can be included in the established musical theatre.

1. John Montague: Irish poet and writer; born in New York in 1929; returned to Ireland in 1933 and was appointed the first professor for poetry in Ireland in 1998.

2. Sujata Bhatt: Indian poet, writer and translator (including Gujarati poems); born in Ahmedabad 1956; emigrated to the USA in 1968 and now lives in Bremen.

Translation Wendy Wallis