Lunea

Two decades after his opera Schneewittchen (1997–1998), Heinz Holliger has composed his second full-length stage work for the Zurich Opera House. The new opera is based on Lunea, an existing song cycle premiered in 2013 by Christian Gerhaher in Zurich, and its subsequent orchestral version.

The opera Lunea presents the life and character of the Late Romantic poet Nikolaus Lenau with a libretto by Händl Klaus. Rather than follow a linear biographical narrative, it instead depicts the vibrant personality of the poet in 23 aphoristic streams of thought and dream images. Some of Lenau’s texts set by Holliger consist of only a few lines. In their relentless focus on the essential, they become the concentrated emotion that entered the history of ideas as ‘Weltschmerz’. Holliger musically underlines the expressive and disjointed structure of the texts with the solo violin given particular prominence (Lenau also played the violin and guitar).

Lunea is an expression of Holliger’s fascination with artists who developed mental disorders towards the end of their lives, alongside his Violin Concerto ‘Hommage à Louis Soutter’, the Scardanelli-Zyklus dedicated to Friedrich Hölderlin, the Siebengesang on a poem by Georg Trakl and his homage to Robert Schumann, Romancendres. Lenau was admitted to a psychiatric clinic following a stroke in 1844 and was considered mentally ill up to his death in 1850.