Ensemble Novoflot, Max Czollek & Michael Wertmüller

Novoflot, Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951), Max Czollek (*1987), Michael Wertmüller (*1966): Die Harmonielehre #3 «Ein Ermordeter aus Warschau» (2024, Swiss premiere)

To mark the 150th anniversary of Arnold Schönberg’s birth, Ensemble Novoflot, author Max Czollek and composer Michael Wertmüller dare to take a new look at his harrowing Holocaust piece “A Survivor from Warsaw”

One would have thought that Arnold Schönberg’s 1947 melodrama “A Survivor from Warsaw” was merely a historical document of the time, focussing on the suppression of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto – a harrowing testimony to the most brutal dehumanisation and one of the few musical works to specifically address the Holocaust.

75 years after the premiere, the Berlin opera company Novoflot is rewriting the composition against the backdrop of historical and current war and expulsion scenarios as part of a multi-part Schönberg project (“Die Harmonielehre”). The Berlin writer Max Czollek and the composer Michael Wertmüller from Thun created the basis for a music theatre hybrid that constantly realigns itself between opera, performance, installation, jazz gig and concert. The compass of our perception must be constantly readjusted.