Le Balcon

Wolfgang Rihm
Jakob Lenz
Chamber opera by Wolfgang Rihm (born 1952) after Lenz by Georg Büchner
Libretto by Michael Fröhling
Opera premiered in 1979 in Hamburg

This production premiered on 30 November 2016 at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. 
Revived in March 2019 at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet and in 2022 at the Salzburg Festival in concert version.

‘For me, the musical stage’, says Rihm, ‘is a place where very magical and very human things take place. In Jakob Lenz, the human aspects often shift to magical ones, because the realism of a disturbed, self-rationalizing soul takes on surreal traits — or we are utterly unable to understand it except as not being real. A character like Jakob Lenz appears complex on stage simply due to the fact that he harbours many stages within himself, and the music has to represent these constantly present stages.

I have tried to do this in the most direct way — by not neatly separating the musical layers, but keeping them constantly present until they are compelled to burst out, each in accord with its own dramaturgy. On balance, the overall form takes on features of a rondo performed in overlapping layers; a type of rondo relief, since perspectives of psychological proximity and distance are indeed formulated musically as atmospheric relations. Above all, the thread on which Jakob Lenz hangs is a current flowing into the listener’s heart.'