We turned to the five movements of the Trio Suite that Stravinsky himself drew from his own work in 1919: detached from its original dramaturgy, its music opens up to new associations. We built a new story around it, inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished fragments for two projects, the Lehrstück Downfall of the Egoist Johann Fatzer and the opera The Travels of the God of Happiness — two texts that also question that same pivotal moment in history when everything could have turned upside down.

That moment in 1917 was when mass propaganda and mechanized destruction took a lasting hold on Western societies and gave rise to the world we live in today. Not surprisingly, it was also the moment when Stravinsky and Brecht developed, separately and each in their own way, an art form we now call music theatre. In this ironically philosophical and interdisciplinary form of chamber theatre, developed with the care befitting chamber music, media are not fused into a total, monolithic work of art, but interact as equals — and their friction produces sparks. Music theatre is an exaltation of heterogeneity, against consensus. A weapon of resistance, like the cabaret and collage that irrigated it at the same time, music theater offers itself to us as a legacy that needs to be built on in dire times to come.

Disclaimer: As The Fatzer Soldier’s Tale presents Igor Stravinsky’s Trio Suite, which was originally intended for concert performances without text, in a stage version with a new text, it has been banned from performance by the composer’s estate, and will not be available on European tour until Stravinsky’s catalogue enters public domain on January 1, 2042.