Verbrannte Erde

On the eve of the official opening of the 2017 International May Festival (after the Wagner Gala Concert) you are invited to an “anarchic-musical world conflagration” on Warmer Damm Park.

Swedish artist Markus Öhrn, already known to Wiesbaden for his performance piece “Azdora” during the 2016 Biennale, returns to the city to stage the world’s first “Molotov Cocktail Opera”. Inspired by the war-like title “Scorched Earth”, Öhrn, alongside composer and conductor Arno Waschk will bring the Wagnerian fire from the State Theatre’s stage onto the green expanse of the adjacent park. It is a spectacular, poetic new work for eight singers and two Molotov cocktail throwers; a ritual declaration of love to the anarchist Richard Wagner – a man who, after all, would have preferred the “Ring” to have been performed only once on a temporary stage, with both the stage and score being burned for all eternity thereafter! And there is the fiery destruction at the end of “Götterdämmerung”, giving rise to what can only be described as an uncertain future. Markus Öhrn relishes in the secret lusts of the radical artist, allowing it to blaze up in a fervent frenzy of art.  An opera in the footsteps of Russian anarchist Bakunin (a man also admired by Wagner), who postulated in 1842: “The desire for destruction is a creative passion too!”