MELENCOLIA is a transdigital music theater show against the indifference of the universe, composed for Ensemble Modern, premiered at the Bregenzer Festspiele 2022, and supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media as a highly innovative project.  

Over the centuries and across cultures, melancholy has experienced the most diverse and contradictory attributions. It has been universally addressed as a physical illness as well as a moment of contemplation, as a possibility of overcoming earthly suffering, and as the sister of genius. Albrecht Dürer’s enigmatic polyhedron in the equally enigmatic painting Melencolia I has become a symbol of these contradictions and the insoluble amidst human longing for redemption. MELENCOLIA is a hypertext that has become space, in which sound, light, body, and image sources establish themselves as elementary particles and continually reform in an ongoing process of transformation. In the musical, playful and also strict handling of stereotypes from Renaissance, Romanticism, pop and kitsch, the music theater embarks on a search for the liberating melancholic mood.

By using the MELENCOLIA APP, an augmented reality overture, we enter a futuristic stage setting where the audience finds itself in the middle of a 3D audio landscape. Live mapping and advanced green screen techniques, live electronics and collective gaming scenes, melt the boundaries of the opera genre. 14 instrumental soloists of the Ensemble Modern encounter virtual guests such as the Iranian Ney Anban virtuoso Saeid Shanbehzadeh or their own digital twins. Artificial intelligences and synthetically cloned voices meet digital image worlds and bizarre parallel existences, an incessant stream of instrumental and electronic sounds leads the audience into familiar as well as surreal listening spaces. MELENCOLIA is not only a show about an ensemble facing its own transience, but also an attempt to fathom the strange digital melancholy of our time.