Ein Traumspiel

The god Indra send his daughter down to earth in order for her to see if complaints about the meaninglessness of man‘s existence are justified. On her travels she encounters, in episodic sequences of images and metaphors without a continuous action, situations in everyday human life. There is one thing all episodes have in common: They symbolize human ideals, hopes and values which are all reversed into their opposite. Love turns into indifference, ambition leads to failure, the search for knowledge degenerates into a meaningless, ridiculous argument, the pursuit of justice is rewarded with ridicule and rejection. There is no salvation: When Indra‘s daughter fi nally opens a mysterious door in the theatre, behind which she hopes to find the answer to the questions which initiated her search, no consolation or utter certainty can be found there however, only absolute emptiness. Indra‘s daughter realizes: ‚Oh, now I know that it means to be human.‘ The people she had met throw the symbols of their sad stories into the fi re which purifi es and consumes Indra‘s daughter before she returns to her father.

"An extremely effective […] theatre music of a topical nature captivated from the fi rst note – long drawn-out vocal lines become denser, releasing numerous colours into a large orchestra with winds and percussion. The structure is not noticed as such, even though leitmotifs exist for the four most important characters – three-note motifs each – which, all in all, result in a twelve-note row. But, first and foremost, an astounding cantabile quality is reached, a melodic intensity and fascination, which basically remains unsurpassed in Reimann‘s later works." (Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski, Opernwelt 4/1987; review of the Wiesbaden performance in 1987)