Live recordings of Orpheus Kristall:

Video from a section of the 4th scene. In this Bayerischer Rundfunk production, preproduced video sequences as well as screen shots of a Quintet.net Client are superimposed on the live video of the stage.

The concept of realizing a music theater production that also utilizes the potential of computers and global networks is historically long over due. The Orpheus tale, an ancient myth, is suitable for an experiment with the new multimedia for several reasons. The saga of the singer who goes to Hades to retrieve his wife is still known today: one does not have to relate the contents of the story - via any kind of medium - before one uses the story. The relative popularity of the story, however, is based on only a small excerpt of the myth. A differentiation is required, challenging the audience to think in different dimensions. Myths describe a virtual reality; they do not provide a protocol of events. The story of Orpheus more or less comes from the realm of fantasy and the realm of ideal images and not from everyday, real life. Orpheus enters a world that no mortal has ever seen and there is no guideline for his experiences. He searches, but he does not determine the rules of the plot. It seems that his subjectivity is inoperable, extinguished, in Hades - this process used to be called death. He sees Eurydice, but is it really she, or does he see a phantom, a product of his fantasy? Several contrasting pairs are found in this myth: man - woman, life - death, reality - imagination, remembrance - experience/present, internal world - external world. They guide us to the contents of the saga, but also to its intellectual structure. At the same time they serve as an impetus for the intermedia concept.

Manfred Stahnke's music starts in silence and then we hear pulsating sounds and individual small "explosions." Orpheus enters. He finds his way to sound, to syllables, to language, as if a remembrance were slowly taking shape. The events on the stage receive, as it were, vibrations coming from far away and leading into virtuality. Orpheus remains on the stage during all five scenes of the opera. Eurydice, on the other hand, appears in three guises, split into three characters, three different imagoes, "wish images" and experienced images of women as seen from a male point of view. The main flow of the piece until the scene in the middle is like a maelstrom - in the dramaturgy (Orpheus is lured and drawn deeper and deeper into Hades) and in the music.

The concept, which Manfred Stahnke and Bettina Wackernagel developed in collaboration with Peter Staatsmann, is no more narrative and linear than the libretto, which was written by Simone de Mello. Moments of reflection, of remembering, of association, of oscillating between the real and the imagined, and finally between the threatening dissolution of the subject, the fragmentation and new construction of perception and language - all of these elements gain meaning. "The art form of opera enables a special access to material in the acoustic-visual creation of the work, and the scenic dimension always plays a special role. But music theater is not dependent upon the conventions of narrative portrayal, even if its own history is permeated with it. In the meantime the film medium can tell stories better and the stories are more authentic to the audience. The opportunities of music theater lie in its multimedia character, that is, in the combination of time, performance, light, text and music." (Bettina Wackernagel) Manfred Stahnke's music - a spectral composition where the percussion instruments play an important role, especially the sub bass marimba of Robyn Schulkowsky, built especially for this production - opens windows to its external world: Sounds of the events on the stage and their acoustic extension and sounds produced by practical items from everyday life (metal sheets, nails, plastic pipes) are integrated into the percussion. The hocket at the end of the work, before the music fades into silence, not only traces the rise of fragments of memory in Orpheus, but it also organizes memory by the use of an old form and phrase technique. But above all, from the beginning Manfred Stahnke's score is designed for musical connections with the Internet.

The Internet will be integrated into the Orpheus Crystal project in two ways:

1. The score by Manfred Stahnke, the dramaturgy and the production of the piece receive windows for the Internet to be superimposed onto the performance. Music comes from the Net and combines with the music in the theater in certain situations; it will be triggered by the character who is constantly on stage, Orpheus. What he sings will be recorded with the software program quintet.net (which was developed and successfully tested by Georg Hajdu), transcribed into notation and sent over the Internet to four musicians in different countries across the globe. They react to what they see in the notation, and counterpoint Orpheus' singing with their own improvisations. Each musician has his or her own specific character. The quintet.net software program not only allows their improvisations to be integrated into the music of the performance, but it also allows a synchronization with the key notes and base notes that determine the orchestral movement. In addition Georg Hajdu can control the sound relationships between those who are online with quintet.net. Corresponding to the score and the events on stage, he fades the remote musicians in and out. Thus some passages of their improvisations remain virtual and others become audible, but not as self-contained sections but rather as excerpts from a music that is permanently in flux, and which moves, as adopted music, in the voltage field between virtuality and reality.

2. On 28 September 2001 the Internet project Orpheus Crystal will be accessible as a work in progress (www.orpheuskristall.net). At first the project will consist of one module, but in the time leading up to the world premiere it will gradually be expanded to five modules - also in reaction to the development of the stage version of the project. The project opens up an individual look at the Orpheus story. The aim is to confront the myth with reality, with reality's recognized, acknowledged, unrecognized and suppressed dimensions: with beauty and sexual desire, with the dream of the ideal partner and the impossibility to live or find the ideal life of an ideal couple. This cosmos of experiences is linked to the idea of virtual memory. Bettina Westerheide, media artist, is developing the Internet presence in collaboration with the stage artists: "In a blurry digital memory Eurydice appears to Orpheus briefly as a breeze, as a fleeting shadow. In a strange dance of the lovers, barely visible, intangible and murky, as if seen through frosted glass. Was it really she? She disappeared when she slammed into the glass, and she left her imprint on the glass. The only visible thing that remains behind her ... is a blurred, X-ray-like imprint of her body. This imprint is the relict, the relief, Eurydice's trail and simultaneously the starting point and the instrument for Orpheus' search for Eurydice (...) Through the imprint Orpheus (i.e., the user as a virtual co-member of the dramatis personae) can enter the layers beneath it, as in a (reverse) X-ray process - he can touch the layers and make them visible. The system answers in code, in complex, multiple-coded formal messages, apparently providing clues to conditions, structures, and degrees of vitality. The search for clues to Eurydice's trail begins. (...) Musical fragments and quotes from the libretto become components of guiding lines leading through the interior of the system." Possibilities and limitations of the medium come to the surface at the same time. The stage and Internet production exist in principle independently; they can essentially be viewed independent from each other. They are, however, intertwined in multiple ways: with the theme, with the common images inherent to the production and the Net animation, with images of the production on the Web site, with images on the Web site that reappear as stage sets and stage projections, and ultimately with the libretto, the dramaturgy and the music. The entire scope of the project can only be experienced by those who access both the Internet version and the stage production in the Carl-Orff-Saal.

The stage set for Orpheus Crystal will be constructed like an island on the stage of the Carl-Orff-Saal. The surface of the stage set will be at a slant and in the shape of a trapezoid, narrower towards the rear of the stage. A platform is imbedded in the stage that can be raised or lowered and is illuminated from below. The back wall is a projection screen with the proportions of a monitor. This projection screen serves as a permeable border, for it has openings, so that the performance can be crossed with the scene and the projection.

Manfred Stahnke was born in 1951 in Kiel. In 1966 he started to study composition and musicology in Lübeck, Freiburg, Hamburg and the U.S. In 1973 he passed his exams in music theory and composition in Freiburg. In 1979 he earned his doctorate in Hamburg with Constantin Floros; the subject of his thesis was Pierre Boulez. Manfred Stahnke studied composition in Freiburg in 1970 with Wolfgang Fortner, and from 1973-74 with Klaus Huber. As of 1974 his principal professor was György Ligeti. For many years now Stahnke has worked intensively with the new, computer-supported techniques. In the U.S. he used computers in 1979 and 1980 to create precise microtonal music. At Stanford University, where he started working in 1980, he was introduced to real-time systems, which were new at the time. Since 1989 he has been using his knowledge of computer music at the School of Music and Theater in Hamburg, above all to conduct precise microtone experiments and to study complex metrics, in particular from the Middle Ages in Europe, and to study various non-European music traditions. Starting in 1983 Stahnke worked as an associate lecturer of music theory at the School of Music and Theater in Hamburg, and he has been a professor of composition and music theory at the same school since 1994, where he teaches his own composition class. Stahnke's works have received prizes and awards: 1978 in Hitzacker, 1979 in Stuttgart and 1983 in Bonn (Beethoven Prize). The East German Cultural Committee granted him awards in 1983 and 1985. In 1985 he also received the Bach Award Scholarship, Hamburg, and the Culture Award Scholarship, Kiel, and he was awarded in 1989 the Ligeti Prize. Stahnke has dealt with aspects of contemporary music at international symposiums and written numerous essays on theory. He has been a lecturer in, among other places, Wellington (New Zealand) and at the Institute of Musicology of the University of Hamburg, and he has conducted seminars in many countries. In 1991 Manfred Stahnke and Peter Niklas Wilson founded the Gesellschaft für Neue Musik Hamburg e. V. (The Society of New Music). And in 1992 he founded the ensemble Chaosma together with friends of his from studying with Ligeti. Since 1999 he has been a member of the Music Advisory Board of the Goethe Institute. In the same year he was elected a member of the Free Academy of the Arts in Hamburg.