Theater Bremen after the death of the director: But pathos fits well

Finally, at the very end of Kaija Saariaho's opera "Innocence", the ghostly Markéta lets go of her mother. Played in Bremen by soprano Nadine Lehner, she sadly sings her way through survival as an occasional waitress. And until then, that was overshadowed by the daughter's violent death a long time ago.

But now it seems as if hope is breaking out: the traumatized mother will have a future because the walking corpse of a girl, Markéta, has released her; because folk-pop performer Venla Ilona Blom finally joiks completely into the realm of the dead.

The verb joiken is derived from Joik, which is the name of the Sámi shaman song. Condemned as satanic by Lutheran missionaries from the 17th century onwards, it was persecuted until the 1990s, although ultimately no longer with executions, flogging and other corporal punishment.

In terms of sound, it is characterized above all by pressed, often piercingly sharp tones with nasal resonance produced by laryngeal pressure. Ritually, the Joik opens the transition from the afterlife to the present. And a singer who masters it as much as Blom makes magical transgression seem possible.

In order to musically shape the interaction between people and spirits, the Finnish composer Saariaho, who died in 2023, adopted the Joik for her operatic work. This is particularly impressive in this school shooting opera, which premiered in Aix-en-Provence in 2021; Although school shooting repression opera would probably be more correct here.

Librettist Sofi Oksanen set the plot 10 years after such a rampage: the scene is the wedding of the perpetrator's brother. Soprano Julia Grüter as the bell-like bride Stella marries unsuspectingly into the massacre in which everyone else is somehow involved: the shot students wander through the party. They describe the details of their murder in melodious, multilingual language.

The New York Times, Guardian, the specialist magazine Diapason and everyone else hailed the opera, which had little plot but was full of suspense, as a masterpiece immediately after its world premiere; In Germany alone, they have now produced five theaters in Bremen alone, a record for an opera in the 21st century. In Bremen it marks the beginning of a season with which the theater says goodbye: Michael Börgerding, who took over as director of the four-part theater in 2012, died in January 2025.

Since then, Börgerding's estate has been looked after for a year, meaning that long-planned and long-awaited things have been implemented. A team led by director and author Armin Petras will take over next season. There is no break in terms of personnel either: music dramaturge Frederike Krüger, who is already heading the division in Bremen, will also be there. At the same time, with the Saariaho Opera, she is creating a clearly noticeable turning point: after 2008, no musical theater work by a woman had been produced in Bremen's Great House. There, at that time, wild things were always done with the repertoire operas of dead composers, mostly by wild, eternally young men.

One of them is Marco Štorman, who was able to discover his love of opera in Bremen. He now directs films all over Germany. His critically acclaimed productions are characterized by often rather crude but easily readable symbolism. In “Innocence”, his eighth Bremen music theater work, he sometimes has the actors walk across the stage with huge plastic lilies so that it is clear to everyone: they are just carrying their innocence in front of them.

But pathos fits well with the cleverly structured, quite romantic composition with ominous chord rows on the piano and dark bassoon cantilenas. The Bremen Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Stefan Klingele, performs it rousingly. And like every dream world, the polar ocean of souls that set designer Eva Veronica Born has pushed together from jagged surfaces can tolerate a bit of kitsch. There is a hole in the middle.

The spoken theater in Bremen also does mourning work at the start of the season. Similar building blocks of melancholy are used for this: what the icy illuminated clods are in the opera are anthracite-painted rocks on the dark spatial stage of the Small House, set up by Nicole Marianna Wytyczak. A “mourning ceremony” was supposed to take place between them here on Friday. At least that's how Ralph Tharayil wrote his second theater text to date, "I. Grief. Different." rubricated.

Tharayil won the “open mike” in 2017 and his story “knocked you out,” said taz critic Detlef Kuhlbrodt at the time. This can be done via "I. Grief. Different." Now really don't say. The text has seven sections. It is structured by a refrain: “WHY IS THERE SNOW HERE / YESTERDAY WAS SATURDAY / TODAY IS SUNDAY / TODAY IS SNOW FROM YESTERDAY” is what it says. The day of the week changes in each round.

Mounted in between are associative sentence collections on the subject of grief. This is supposed to refer to a very schematic father figure, who is referred to as “Dad”. A real stage situation only arises where the text imagines a competitive training of the mourning muscles, something like the opening of the will at the beginning of Jean Paul's “Boat Years”: whoever cries first wins. The four actors simultaneously make an effort to burst into tears using conventional suffering poses.

That's funny. The rest of the brainstorm jelly, on the other hand, seems listlessly mixed together. Neither Miriam Ibrahim's gripping direction nor the concentrated reciting cast can do much to change this. At least they manage to rhythmize the prose and give their supposedly different voices a dance presence.

As a speaking concert of talk sometimes drowning out each other, sometimes performed chorally, it can definitely be enjoyed. But the content remains sad: it's not sad. It leaves you cold.