FULL INSOMNIA (Manfred Trojahn) London 2015 Sarah Minns

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: INSOMNIA   
• Composer: Trojahn Manfred   
• Libretto: Rainer Maria Rilke, with extracts from Lou Salome and Marilyn Monroe    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: New Diorama Theatre, London, UK  
• Recorded: July 25 & 26, 2015
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: Sarah Minns
• Conductor: David Eaton  
• Orchestra: Instrumental Ensemble  
• Stage Director: Ralph Bridle  
• Stage Designer: Cécile Trémolières  
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: tete a tete  
• Date Published: 2015  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: nosubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  Genesis

  “I first encountered Manfred Trojahn’s music in 1994 – namely his first opera Enrico (after Pirandello’s Henry IV) at Kassel Opera – when working as a director in German music theatre. In 2000, I directed Trojahn’s Twelfth Night at Innsbruck. Trojahn is one of the most interesting and frequently performed living composers in Germany. In 2012, Katie Mitchell directed the world premiere of his Orest at Amsterdam. INSOMNIA will, amazingly enough, be the very first staging of one of his works in the UK” – Ralph Bridle.

  Though conceived as a song-­‐cycle, Trojahn’s Rilke-­‐settings have an inherent drama and narrative thrust that make them ideally suited for stage production. As a study of a relationship, they have an unsettling universality – making them much more than just a musical biography of Lou Salomé and Rilke.

  About

  INSOMNIA is a staged version of composer Manfred Trojahn’s new song-­‐cycle for soprano and piano: eighteen early love poems by Rainer Maria Rilke for Lou Andreas Salomé. Trojahn set this cycle of love lyrics by Rilke to music for his first lover, Lou Salomé – the result of which is a drama in miniature.

  When they met in 1897, Rilke was 21, Lou 36.

  The actual love affair between Lou and Rilke – when these poems were written – lasted only four years, but their intense friendship and exchange of thoughts and feelings, real or in letter form, continued for much longer, right up until Rilke’s death from Leukemia in 1926.

  Rilke is one of the great pioneers of twentieth-­‐century German literature. Russian intellectual Lou Salomé worked closely with Freud and became the first female psycholanalyst. Together, the names of their respective lovers (or crushes) read like a ‘who’s who’ of contemporary arts, philosophy, psychology and political activism: Nietzsche, Freud, Claire Goll, Baladine Klossowska, Ellen Key, Paula Modersohn-­‐Becker, Marina Zwetajewa and Eleonora Duse, amongst others.

  INSOMNIA is a monodrama. Though it is about the lifelong attachment of two people, Lou Salomé tells the story alone. She sings the love-­‐poems of her youthful lover – describing in eighteen discrete and ever more stormy verses the flowering and bitter demise of their brief passion. The songs arealso like a template for their intense friendship of almost thirty years, right down to Rilke’s tragic death. Lou remained the most important person in the poet’s life. Spoken commentary fills in their parallel biographies. Occasionally the narrative veers away from the histiorical figures of Lou and Rilke, becoming something more universal, hence the appearance of that great reader and admirer of Rilke, Marilyn Monroe – the insomniac of the opera’s title.

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