Schwetzingen SWR Festival: Malina

Music theater by Karola Obermüller, Peter Gilbert (music), and Tina Hartmann (libretto) on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Ingeborg Bachmann, based on the novel of the same name. 100 Years of Ingeborg Bachmann. In the Ingeborg Bachmann Year 2026, the Schwetzinger SWR Festival, in cooperation with the Theater Aachen, will rediscover the radicality and relevance of the writer. The composer duo Karola Obermüller and Peter Gilbert, together with librettist Tina Hartmann, will create a piece of music theater from Bachmann's "Malina" for the first time. It addresses themes of male oppression, female self-discovery, the nightmarish processing of the Nazi past, and the search for the voice of an artist in a patriarchal society. Who or what is Ingeborg Bachmann's mysterious title character with such a feminine-sounding name? The opera's answer is a play beyond binary gender clichés with a surprising twist. "It was murder," is the famous last sentence of the novel – spoken by the dead victim. From this paradox, the music theater explores the utopian potential of fluid transitions between genders and celebrates the magic of the non-binary. Ingeborg Bachmann herself had a deep relationship with music and opera. For the composer Hans Werner Henze, with whom she was closely friends, she wrote two librettos. He was the only one to set her texts to music during her lifetime. Bachmann's language is always highly musical. "Malina" is also full of sounds: the novel not only references Wagner's "Tristan" and Schönberg's "Pierrot lunaire," but also plays with the musical devices of theme and variation. Henze referred to "Malina" as "Mahler's Eleventh." And Bachmann's poem "Enigma," which she dedicated to Henze, illuminates how closely sound and silence come together in this artist's work: "You must not cry, says a music. Otherwise, no one says anything." Premiere in cooperation with the Theater Aachen. Funded as part of the New Music Theater Fund. Age recommendation: from 14 years.