Pacific Musicworks—Chamber opera in Seattle
Stephen Stubbs, Artistic Director

Heiner Goebbels (1952–    ) began his musical career while still a student of sociology at the University of Frankfurt am Main. In 1982, at the height of the German noise-rock explosion, he embarked on a 10-year career as touring musician with the band Cassiber, still revered by prog-rockers as among the most extravagantly adventurous of the their era. Over the years Goebbels became more intrigued with formal composition to dramatic and literary texts. His breakthrough work was Surrogate Cities, a work for large orchestra employing texts by Paul Auster and Heiner Müller. The 2000 ECM recording was nominated for a Grammy and continues to sell well.

All of Goebbels’ later compositions reflect his insight that live performance is inherently theatrical. Without asking them to “act,” he makes the presence of the players, their faces and voices and movements, part of the unfolding musical experience. In Songs of Wars I Have Seen, Gertrude Stein’s recollections of civilian life in occupied France are spoken by women of the musical ensemble, dressed in ordinary informal day-wear, sitting among a setting of homely domestic furnishings, while the dark-clad men huddle behind them, their amplified instruments creating a haze of cold alien sounds around the sweet plangency of the women’s string ensemble.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was born into a wealthy American-Jewish family but spent most of her life in Europe. (Her assessment of her childhood Oakland, California: “There is no there there.”) Settling with her brother Leo in Paris in 1903, she quickly became one of the most important collectors of 20th century art. But during the same years she began writing the series of tales and memoirs which made her notorious as “the mama of Dada.” The earliest of these works, Three Lives, is now recognized as a landmark of contemporary prose, which has profoundly influenced the style of later writers from Ernest Hemingway to Raymond Carver.

From the beginning, Stein’s writings, abstract, childlike, and insightful, have fascinated musicians. For Virgil Thomson she wrote the libretti for two of the most enduring American operas, Four Saints in Three Acts (1927) and The Mother of Us All (1947), and, a whole cycle of musical entertainments by Al Carmines during the heady Off-Broadways ’60s. Her 1938 libretto for the unwritten opera Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights has inspired a whole generation of American theater artists (Judson Poets’ Group, the Living Theatre, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson and the Wooster Group among them) to some of their most significant work.