Sonic Auras and Soul Sounds
Peter Eötvös’ Three Sisters is not a linear setting of Chekhov, but takes the theme of suffering and paralysis, captivity and hope to a higher poetic level.
A lonely accordion begins. Its bellows take in air and expel melancholy. Its wheeze seems unreal, tender and vulnerable. Delicate rising notes, starting over and over, gradually turn into an unhurried little round dance, as if in slow motion and on tiptoe. Then, suddenly, that magical moment when the voices come in. “The notes of the music are so cheerful,” the three sisters Olga, Masha and Irina begin their lament: “Not long now, and we will experience the meaning of existence, the meaning of suffering.” Shortly thereafter, it comes as a shock when, towards the end of the sadness that spreads throughout this trio, this gaze into wounded souls suddenly expands to huge dimensions: the sound of the large orchestra positioned behind the stage joins the protagonists on stage and the ensemble in the pit. This leads into the first of three – no, not acts, but “sequences”.
Indeed, Peter Eötvös starts at the end. Which means that in his musical-theatre version of Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, the epilogue forms the opening, and everything begins with the last words. An apparently random slice of Russian society in the provinces in the early 20th century, dialogues that seem to trickle along aimlessly, but offer profound insights all the same. “Everything has already happened, life has passed,” the director Evgeny Titov explains the situation, with some fascination: “In hindsight, we ask ourselves: what was that, actually? Why did we have to suffer so much? What was the point?”
“My music is theatre music, it is not incidental music, but theatre in and of itself”: Peter Eötvös repeated this life motto over and over, in different variations. In 1966, the Hungarian from Transylvania moved to Cologne for his studies, working closely with Karlheinz Stockhausen, later taking over the leadership of Ensemble Intercontemporain from Pierre Boulez and developing into one of the most important composers, conductors and teachers of our times. At the Salzburg Festival, he conducted a Bartók opera evening focused on Bluebeard’s Castle, among other performances; as a composer, he was represented here not least with the world premiere of his Halleluja – Oratorium babulum in 2016.
When Eötvös died at the age of 80 in Budapest in 2024, he had followed Three Sisters – his first large-scale opera, premiered in Lyon in 1998 – with ten further musical theatre works of varying inner and outer dimensions. These include the setting of Jean Genet’s Le Balcon, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, but also the “theatre with music” entitled Der goldene Drache, a piece based on Roland Schimmelpfennig’s eponymous play, full of slightly absurd tragicomedy.
Dramatic, palpable. Yes, theatre: indeed, Eötvös’ diverse oeuvre, in which he has often developed new facets from one work to the next, is marked by an urgency in language and gesture. Even in purely instrumental pieces, animated dialogues and arguments can take place, with clearly defined sonic figures entering into dramatic exchanges – with a plasticity of expression which keeps being experimentally heightened while still remaining rooted in traditions going back to the baroque and renaissance eras. His entire music-making, whether creative or performing, is based on dialogue and exchange. Eötvös’ Three Sisters differs from Chekhov’s original, which was first performed at Moscow’s Art Theatre in 1901. The dramaturgy – unheard-of at the time of its premiere – of an action without actual main figures and central plotlines, both of which are replaced with random-seeming bundles of secondary plotlines, is translated and transferred by Claus H. Henneberg and Eötvös in their libretto (which they jointly wrote in German and then translated back into Russian) into a formative element immanent to the music: that of repetition, varied repetition – or, to use one of Schoenberg’s favourite terms, the “developed variation”.
“I tell the story three times,” Eötvös explained, “and each time, another person is the central one. That means that the same scene has a different focus each time.” In doing so, Eötvös concentrates on the many, overlapping triangular relationships between the characters, each of which has their “own” instruments associated with them in the chamber ensemble in the pit – and thus their own, clearly defined sonic aura. The fact that Eötvös also harmonically plays with the figure three, which is musically represented by the interval of the major or minor third or the tritone, becomes an element of a music which seems to remind the listeners of something they have never heard before: neither does it curry favour with any kind of “neo”-style, nor would it seem dry or even unintelligible to a broad audience. Then there is the artful device of having the three sisters Irina, Masha and Olga sung and played by three countertenors: this moves the characters into an intermediate gender realm – or, as Alain Aubin, the world premiere’s Olga, said: “We are neither men nor women, we are the souls of the three sisters.”
Wistful, threatening. And in the end? What is that ghostly sound in the high strings that seems to come from afar? In the heat, the air seems to shimmer – and also to freeze in icy silence. The clarinet contributes wistful melodic phrases, with the contrabassoon occasionally emitting an intimidating burbling underneath. “Oh my god, where has everything gone!”, Olga sighs. And she reacts strictly to the strange mewling of viola and cello: “Stop whistling, Masha!”
“What never lets us go and still remains in the end is hope,” says Evgeny Titov. Born in Kazakhstan in 1980, he studied acting at the Theatre Academy in St. Petersburg and worked as a performer himself before studying directing at the Reinhardt-Seminar in Vienna. At the Salzburg Festival, he started out with Russian repertoire – in 2019, when he stepped in to save Maxim Gorky’s Summerfolk. In the meantime, he has directed Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Graz Opera and most recently Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta at the Vienna State Opera, both to great acclaim. In the role of the three sisters, he can count on the outstanding young singers Dennis Orellana, Cameron Shahbazi and Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen. Maxime Pascal conducts in the pit, Alphonse Cemin conducts backstage, and the Klangforum Vienna Orchestra performs.
Text: Walter Weidringer
Translation: Alexa Nieschlag
First published on 31.05.2025 in Die Presse Kultur Spezial: Salzburger Festspiele