Die wunderbaren Jahre, a new stage work from Torsten Rasch, been celebrated by critics followings its premiere at Theater Regensburg, directed by Sabine Sterken and conducted by John Spencer. The music theatre work for 3 singers, narrator, and chamber ensemble is based on Reiner Kunze’s eponymous 1976 collection of prose vignettes. Kunze’s searing account of everyday life growing up in the former East Germany was banned in the GDR, ahead of his expulsion from the Writers’ Union and subsequent exile to the West in 1977. Die wunderbaren Jahre is in rep until June 2025. Watch the trailer here.
Rasch's music…is characterized by the tensions of classical modernism before the First World War, music of spiritual turmoil and endangered tenderness, reminiscent of Schreker and Zemlinsky, the late-tonal Schoenberg and early Berg, raw music of brooding and desire…Rasch has a brilliant idea that fully justifies this musical adaptation…He intersperses the prose with hauntingly arranged songs…an important work of reflection on why the two German states have not become one even after 35 years and what remains to be comprehended about the about this history of division.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Jan Brachmann) 26 February 2025
It works well…the music always remains comprehensible, sparkling…the instrumentation is pointed, with well-defined colours and articulation…folksongs provide another perspective in the narrow world of the GDR: hope, longing, a different world…
Süddeutsche Zeitung (Egbert Tholl) 25 February 2025
…A 90-minute emotional rollercoaster ride…The orchestral accompaniment becomes more and more distorted, voices rub against each other more and more painfully, the resistance and incompatibilities become ever greater…an instrumental requiem and an epilogue left the audience deeply affected and moved.
BR-Klassik (Franziska Stürz) 24 February 2025
…an expressionistic language that veers between atonality and freely-employed tonal elements, to which the accordion adds a pinch of the everyday…very apt and striking…Rasch enriches his palette with alienated folk songs that act as islands in an everyday life of militarisation, indoctrination and intimidation….[Rasch] wants to give musical space to the experience of youth "in spite of everything"…this concentrated work had a disturbing effect…[it] was received with focus and unanimous approval.
Neue musikzeitung (Juan Martin Koch) 24 February 2025
Cast in 21 scenes across 90 minutes, Die wunderbaren Jahre examines the inhumanity of a political system that militarizes its young people and tries, in often absurd ways, to control, indoctrinate and break them. The work is scored for an ensemble of nine instruments – flute, clarinet, bassoon, accordion, and string quartet with double bass – and soprano, mezzo-soprano, and bass soloists, with narrator.
Rasch, who grew up in Dresden, describes the atmosphere of dissent that permeates Die wunderbaren Jahre – a book he acquired on a tour to West Germany with the Dresdener Kreuzchor and smuggled back in secret.
We knew about the unrest among East German intellectuals that began with the expulsion of Wolf Biermann, we knew about the founding of Solidarność and its fight against the repressive system, and finally found an expression of rebellion in our devotedly worn 'Swords into Plowshares' patches, which demanded disarmament on both sides, which was of course a thorn in the side of the state power, because it was 'peace power'.
Die wunderbaren Jahre follows Rasch’s Rotter (2007) in its exploration of German history and life in the former East Germany. Commissioned by Oper Köln, it featured a libretto by East German dissident writer Thomas Brasch and was directed by Katharina Thalbach, one of Germany’s most celebrated actors - also, like Rasch, from the former GDR. The opera, a biography of the titular ‘Rotter’, paints a picture of a man who is both culprit and victim, exploring the horrors of German fascism and life in East Germany following the end of the war.