Nikolaus Brass: Chorszenen für ein Musiktheater II

Work on the choral scenes II began in the spring of 2023, at a time when war had been raging in Europe for a year and 7 October 2023 had not yet happened. It was the first period after the turning point, a time of darkness and constriction, a time when something had come to an end and no one knew what horrors this turning point would bring, but feared the worst. The first thing the turning point brought was the unrest of a general internal militarisation, which then paved the way for external militarisation.

 

Choir–Mass–Power

Against this backdrop, I was busy trying to find what I called a ‘musical image of reality’ for the choir constellation. And soon RUMOUR was one of the possible title words, the unrest, and fama, the rumour. Added to this were the »dreams« in which the ‘images of reality’ already exist before they themselves occur. Finally, after the work on the composition was already well advanced, the words death and deception came into my consciousness as a formulation of the result of this state of time: that what is happening right now amounts to nothing else and consists of nothing else but death and deception.

 

Men versus women–All against one–Deception versus truth

In this textless composition (which I always imagined as a scene from a ritual unknown to me), the transitions between the contours of primitive social constellations are hinted at: at first, the reality of the composite, conflicting song seems to exist, but it remains exposed to the threat or lure of standardisation and de-differentiation. At the other extreme, the voices of the choir blur into an anonymous, faceless mass whose apparent authority no longer lies in the individual voice, but in its obliteration into mass anonymity.

(Nikolaus Brass, December 2025)