Intro
Ariel Dorfman’s theatrical play Death and the Maiden is, through it’s intense dramaturgy with only three main characters offering an extremely wide range of different emotions and multiple quick changes of position, but also through it’s almost painfully day-to-day topical subject about dictatorship, torture, sexual abuse and the eternal choice between revenge and reconciliation, an almost ideal plot for an opera.
Two main reasons, apart from all the above mentioned, were the ones convincing me to propose it for the Malmö Opera. The first was my own, using the house’s wonderful choir shaping a fond of “decaparecidos” – memories of all the disappeared; friends, politicians, defenders of the democracy, but also totally innocent people – that exists in all survivor’s heads, such as the main characters in our play. The second being the awkward fact that the original text is superimposed with lots of musical indications and quotations, mainly by Franz Schubert. The artistic director Lars Tibell immediately asked me if it was going to be one of those pieces “…where they on stage sing about Schubert, without us in the audience hearing a single note of his music?...” But closing the score after 18 months of intensive composing work, probably the most hectic, but perhaps also the most stimulating working period of my life so far, I can assure you that you will hear the spirit of Schubert almost everywhere in the score. Whether the musical drama benefits or not from this, will be in the verdict of the audience.
Jonas Forssell, composer