Die wunderbaren Jahre, a new stage work from Torsten Rasch, will premiere in February 2025 at Theater Regensburg, directed by Sabine Sterken and conducted by John Spencer. It will receive twelve performances and is in rep until June 2025.
A music theatre work for 3 singers, narrator, and chamber ensemble, it is based on Reiner Kunze’s eponymous 1976 collection of prose vignettes on the everyday life of young people growing up in the GDR. Cast in an unbroken 80-minute span, the piece is a musical and dramatic expression of these years, exploring 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 will be a multi-perspective piece of musical theatre drawing on singing, narration and instrumental music to explore a memory of Germany and how it became what it is today.
Rasch, who grew up in Dresden, describes the atmosphere of dissent that permeates Die wundebaren Jahre:
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 opera Rotter in its exploration of German history and life in the former East Germany. The 2007 work, commissioned by Oper Köln, featured a libretto by East German dissident writer Thomas Brasch and was directed by Katharina Thalbach, one of Germany’s most celebrated actors - also 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.
Rasch’s other operas include Die Andere Frau (2019), commissioned by Semperoper Dresden, which retold the biblical story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah to a libretto in ten scenes by writer Helmut Krasser, and The Duchess of Malfi, an adaptation of John Webster by Ian Burton. The 2010 work was a groundbreaking collaboration between the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk and English National Opera, which saw audiences explore the story in a non-linear way in the brooding setting of a warehouse in London’s Docklands. In 2013 it received its German premiere at Theater Chemnitz, in a staging by Dietrich Hilsdorf, using stage and pit in a more conventional mode, and incorporated the original ending that did not feature in the London premiere.