Winter trip (Jelinek)
Winter trip. A play is a work by the Nobel Prize Winner Elfriede Jelinek , published in 2011 by Rowohlt Verlag , which premiered on February 3, 2011 in a production by Johan Simons at the Schauspielhaus der Münchner Kammerspiele and was awarded the Mülheim Dramatist Prize that same year .
Origin and background
Created at the suggestion of the Münchner Kammerspiele , the title of the piece refers to the song cycle of the same name by Franz Schubert , Jelinek's declared favorite composer, whom the author describes as the “artist I admire most, the greatest genius who has ever lived” . Schubert's Winterreise , composed in 1827, a year before his death, consists of 24 songs with piano accompaniment to poems by Wilhelm Müller . Jelinek calls both Schubert's song cycle as well as Müller's poems on which it is based "a lifelong source of inspiration".
content
“I moved in as a stranger, I move out again”: These first words from Schubert's song cycle can also be heard at the beginning of Jelinek's text. There it says: “What pulls me, what pulls me, what pulls me?” Like the wanderer in Schubert's songs, a lyrical self in Jelinek's text wanders restlessly through the world. It's about loneliness, inner emigration, being and remaining alien in the world. In her text, Jelinek interweaves formative impressions and experiences of her own biography such as the difficult relationship with her mother and her father's dementia with social events such as the banking scandal surrounding the sale of the Austrian Hypo Alpe Adria to the Bayerische Landesbank in 2007 or the fate of - not mentioned by name - Natascha Kampusch on a “grotesque choir about foundations and donors, countervalue and present”, which at the end, taking up the last song from Schubert's song cycle, “Der Leiermann” (Over behind the village), turns into a relentlessly ironic one The author's accounting for her role as such leads to: “And what do you have to book? Drawn in by strangers, stripped out strangers, twisting the lyre, always the same lyre, always the same? "
Productions
With over 20 productions, Elfriede Jelinek's Winterreise is one of the most popular German-language theater pieces in recent years. After Johan Simons premiered at the Münchner Kammerspiele it was a. a. by directors such as Andreas Kriegenburg (at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, 2011), Peter Carp (at the Theater Oberhausen , 2011), Nora Schlocker (at the Schauspielhaus Stuttgart , 2012) and as an Austrian premiere by Stefan Bachmann (at the Burgtheater Vienna, 2012) on the Brought stage.
About the more than three-hour premiere, for which director Johan Simons shortened the 120-page text by more than half, Jelinek said in her acceptance speech for the 2011 Mühlheim Dramatists Award that the actors under Johan Simons said their play was “so wonderful have performed that one believes this performance is my text, but it is only a small part, the bigger part is the work of these people… ”The criticism attested Simon's seven-member ensemble a simply impressive harmony, but negative voices also spoke of one “Dutch farmer's theater”, in which “the fine web of text is trampled” in wooden clogs.
In Andreas Kriegenburg's production, the extremely cynical passages on capitalism were deleted in favor of a concentration on the interpersonal levels. The result caused critics to question whether Jelinek's winter trip “could even be tamed with the means of the theater”. Only the father's monologue, spoken by the actress Maria Schrader and played “with inexhaustible nuances of voice and shadowy gestures quite unsentimentally”, was able to “save the evening from being completely noncommittal”, but that does not change the fact that Kriegenburg “does not in the least pinpoint the Sphinx Jelinek “Would come.
At Peter Carp's in Oberhausen, Jelinek's play turned into a "hut fun" with beer benches and alpine scenery, with which the director, in the opinion of the critics, the typical Jelinek "clash of boulevard and philosophy, of party and silence, of ridicule and tragedy" knew how to stage it so that it was suitable for the stage - but the actual potential of the text was "often drowned out by the hustle and bustle of the party".
For her production at the Schauspielhaus Stuttgart, Nora Schlocker had the set designer Marie Roth design a large single-family house in order to emphasize her interpretation of the play as a life-testing search for individual happiness, after becoming at home in a foreign place: “The house is A very central theme in the text, it appears in connection with the sick father who is cared for there, or with Natascha Kampusch, who sits there in the basement, in the Vienna suburb. That interested me, this attempt at happiness, the attempt to construct a home and to try a life. "
For Stefan Bachmann's Viennese production, Olaf Altmann created an impressive ski slope without snow - a stage surface running from top to bottom at a steep 45-degree angle as a symbol for Jelinek's gaze into the abyss - and as a physical challenge for the actors. According to the critics, the highlight of the performance was the passage about Natascha Kampusch, in which voices from the off argue in the most cynical manner about why this girl from the cellar is now in public. It was criticized that of all things the most touching part of the play, which was shortened to a 110-minute version by the director - that about the mentally ill father - would literally be “neglected” because of the massive deletions of the text. Nonetheless, judged others, Stefan Bachmann has now "brilliantly demonstrated the work's suitability for the stage". The production was awarded the Nestroy Theater Prize in 2012 in the categories of best German-language performance and best equipment (stage design: Olaf Altmann).
Awards
- 2011: Mülheim Dramatist Prize
- 2011: German-language piece of the year , chosen by an independent jury of German-language critics in the magazine Theater heute . Production by Johan Simons in the theater of the Münchner Kammerspiele .
expenditure
- In German: Winterreise. A play . 127 p., Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-498-03236-4 .
- In French: winter travel . Traduit par Sophie Herr. Seuil, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-02-104942-8 .
literature
- Corina Caduff, expelled from belonging. Jelinek's “Winterreise” (2011) , in: JELINEK [YEAR] BOOK 2011, pp. 25–40.
- Maria-Regina Kecht, With language towards silence. Elfriede Jelinek's literary approaches to her father , in: JELINEK [YEAR] BOOK 2011, pp. 41–57.
- Jelinek manual. Edited by Pia Janke . Metzler, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-476-02367-4 .
Web links
Elfriede Jelinek: I am a stranger. Acceptance speech for the awarding of the Mühlheim Dramatists Prize 2011 for 'Winterreise' on June 26, 2011, dated July 28, 2011, last accessed on October 26, 2013.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Rowohlt - Elfriede Jelinek: Winter Journey
- ↑ 3Sat - Settlement with oneself. Elfriede Jelinek's "Winterreise"
- ↑ Elfriede Jelinek, Winterreise, p. 127
- ↑ http://www.rowohlt.de/autor/Elfriede_Jelinek.2558.html
- ↑ Steffen Becker on February 3, 2011 on Nachtkritik.de
- ↑ Christopher Schmidt on February 5, 2011 in the Süddeutsche Zeitung
- ^ Till Briegleb on September 12, 2011 in the Süddeutsche Zeitung
- ↑ Irene Bazinger on September 15, 2011 in the FAZ
- ^ Annette Kiel on November 23, 2011 in the Westfälischer Anzeiger
- ↑ quoted from a contribution by Judith Liere about the Jelinek premiere in Stuttgart for SpiegelOnline Kultur on June 13, 2012
- ^ Norbert Mayer in the Wiener Presse on April 7, 2012
- ^ Ulrich Weinzierl on April 12, 2012 in the world
- ↑ Photo by Julian Roeder ( Memento of the original from August 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from the production of the Münchner Kammerspiele
