Music Theatre

PHACE | GUNTEN

25/26.Sep.2015 // 19:30
Wiener Konzerthaus, Berio-Saal
PHACE Series 15/16 – N°1

a musical diary, based on
Robert Walsers novel „Jakob von Gunten“
for an actor, eight musicians and electronics

Idea and Composition

Helmut Oehring

Libretto

Stefanie Wördemann

Radioplay Soundproduction

Torsten Ottersberg GOGH surround music production

Director

Steffen Jäger

Actor

Tim Breyvogel

Stage Design

Sabine Freude

Costume Design

Aleksandra Kica

Sound Design

Alfred Reiter

Light Design

Martin Knaupp

Make-Up

Viola Stockinger
Sarah Kleindienst (assistance)

Assistant Director

Louise Linsenbolz

Production

Markus Bruckner

Head of Production

Reinhard Fuchs

PHACE

Doris Nicoletti, flute
Reinhold Brunner, clarinet
Peter Travnik, trumpet
Barbara Lüneburg, violin/viola
Roland Schueler, cello
Alexandra Dienz, double bass
Mathilde Hoursiangou, piano/keyboard
Berndt Thurner, percussion

«Since I have been here in the Benjamenta Institute, I have succeeded in becoming an enigma for myself», Jakob von Gunten, the main figure of Robert Walser’s novel, writes in his first diary entry. This sentence also serves as slogan above the score of Helmut Oehring’s opus GUNTEN. The Libretto was compiled by Oehring using several fragments of the novel and it follows exactly its plot, starting with Jakob entering the dodgy Benjamenta Institute, where young men are tought to serve, proceeding to the relationship, packed with unacknowledged erotic wishes, between the boy and the school’s headmaster Benjamenta on one hand and between Jakob and Benjamenta’s sister Lisa on the other hand, and ending with the school’s closure and Benjamenta’s invitation to Jakob to leave with him for the desert. In this unsettling story of „Jakob von Gunten“ – staged by the young German director Steffen Jäger – musicians and actors intermesh with each other in a thrilling way, thus featuring how power, discipline and the perversion of education and control lead into disaster.