Ensemble Proton Bern

Bernhard Lang, Das Hirn UA

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) and his work are celebrated and honored on the occasion of his 100th birthday, but also subjected to a critical reassessment. A long overdue shift of emphasis in public perception is due: the focus is not on the “misunderstood” successful author, but on the author and “locksmith of thoughts” of a bold and novel late prose, which reached its peak in the autobiography, the Stoffe, between 1981 and 1990. The renowned Austrian composer Bernhard Lang, who has already worked several times with literary texts, including Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Meyrinck, Samuel Beckett or William S. Burroughs, writes a full-length musical-literary piece for the Ensemble Proton Bern, which is carried by a (singing) female voice that will also make Dürrenmatt’s last text, Das Hirn, audible and understandable.

«Das Hirn» (The Brain) is the last thing I wrote. There are subjects in the Stoffen that are very old. The whole thing is, of course, a retrospective. I always ask myself: how did I become what I am, how did my own thinking come about? (…) For me, writing is a way of becoming clear about the world and mainly about oneself. It’s a process that never ends. Das Hirn is a connection of what I think about the world today. We are not sure today if we are inventing the world with our thoughts or if our view of the world today is not an expression of our thinking. Is it so, or do we interpret it so? That’s why I created a fiction: a brain that is all alone and imagines a world as we see it today.» (Friedrich Dürrenmatt in his last interview with Hugo Loetscher, 1990)

Text rights: Diogenes Verlag

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