Theater Basel – Christoph Marthaler: “Blown up, all the dirt!”

Imagine if the posters at one of Taylor Swift’s major stadium concerts included a notice that tickets could be purchased the week before the concert from Ms. Swift at her New York penthouse in the Adelicia Complex. Completely unbelievable, isn’t it? Not even newcomer bands sell their tickets themselves these days; it is part of the industrial marketing of culture that there are corporations for every service that is associated with it and especially for every service that promises profit, including ticket sales.

A far more important and incomparably more brilliant musician than Taylor Swift, on the other hand, namely Ludwig van Beethoven, had to take care of ticket sales himself in the days before what was probably the most important concert of his career, a “large musical academy for his benefit” in April 1800: According to the concert poster, “Billets” were “with Mr. van Beethoven, in his apartment in the deep ditch No. 241 on the 3rd floor«. That’s where we have this address, “Tiefer Graben”, for the first time. 15 years later, the master had moved several times in the meantime, Beethoven lived again in Tiefen Graben from 1815 to 1817, now at number 8. This address gave the title to the new play by Christoph Marthaler at the Theater Basel.

However, “Tiefer Graben 8” is not a Beethoven piece, nor a biographical evening. Beethoven doesn’t play along. If anything, Marthaler deals with Beethoven’s cosmos, with aspects of his personality, with his way of working, with his doubts, his anger, but above all: with his homelessness, with Beethoven’s quasi-notorious homelessness. “A residence with music by Ludwig van Beethoven” is the subtitle.

Marthaler draws attention to one of the big topics of our time: housing and coexistence in today’s society. He moves elegantly on the terrain of the philosopher Vilém Flusser, who is also quoted in the program booklet about the dichotomy between home and apartment: “One considers the home to be a relatively permanent location, the apartment to be a replaceable, moveable location. The opposite is true: you can change your home or not have one, but you always have to live, no matter where. Because without a place to live you literally die.«

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Anna Viebrock’s varied stage space is anything but historicizing: we see a somewhat run-down, shabby older house, on the right a kind of canteen or workers’ bar with simple Formica furniture, behind it we look into a bedroom with a double bed; in the middle there are two doors that perhaps lead to another apartment, but perhaps also to a stairwell or a toilet. On the left is a kind of living room with three pianos, the middle one of which seems more than battered with its wavy keyboard. The stage allows views from the outside as well as from the inside: looks out of the window, but also those into the lonely existence of the characters in their damaged lives. Sometimes the living space is moved, but mostly its residents or at least those present, because you don’t know exactly where the staff of the piece belongs.

“Do you live here?” is a question that, like “Please come back in 20 minutes!”, runs through the entire piece as a retarding moment. “Do you live here?” What a question! For many people today, where we live is once again hanging by a thread, spun by financial and political circumstances. If you don’t have an apartment now, you probably won’t find one anymore.

Above all, however, we hear again and again the wisdom of the Binse brand, distributed across two speakers: “What has to be, has to be.” “And what doesn’t have to be?” Performance) was written by Heimito von Doderer (1896–1966), who was also tormented by the material and inner questions of his existence, disgusted by the constant “stirring around in his own dirt”. And of course he refers to Beethoven’s last string quartet op. 135 with the question “Must it be?” which is raised there, which is answered vehemently under the title “The difficult decision” in an action-happy allegro: “It must be. «

But what exactly needs to be? The rather desolate group of house residents whose psychogram Marthaler draws are, as they say, the losers of society. You can probably be happy that you are still just about “housed”. “The apartment is the basis of every consciousness because it allows us to perceive the world,” writes Flusser – but when people have to fight for their apartment, when it depends on the profit interests or “own needs” of the landlords, how much consciousness goes beyond fear Can people still develop living space?

One of the central characters of the piece is an older woman in an apron, Mrs. Ida (impressive: Nikola Weisse), who shuffles through the rooms, somehow talks to everyone and yet doesn’t, and once produces a few strange sounds on the broken piano. And then suddenly, smoking a cigarette, she sings Beethoven’s piano song “I love you” in a wondrously off-key and yet, or perhaps because of that, dreamlike way. A vision from another life. It is only the music that still provides consolation for the sad figures in the house “Tiefer Graben 8” and for us, the audience.

All of the music in this performance was composed or at least written by Beethoven. In addition to original and edited, often distorted compositions, the composer Johannes Harneit has also brought to life some of Beethoven’s sketches and marginalia, which can be heard for the first time, especially those for works that were never completed. They are more musical thoughts, thrown down fragments, which in their brevity and sketchiness are sometimes reminiscent of works by Anton Webern.

But beyond these sketches, Beethoven’s completed works were also worked on, including atrocities such as the cantata “The Glorious Moment” written for the opening of the Congress of Vienna with its opening chorus “Europe stands!”, which today seems rather cynical or ridiculous and is accompanied by a chorus is answered with a big volley of laughter, or the pathetic “Victory Symphony” from “Egmont”. It’s divine how Magne Håvard Brekke, who plays Rambausek, plays a jazzy bass figure on his instrument, which looks like a kind of giant tuba, in an almost valentine-like manner and continues this immediately after the end of the evil triumphant piece, as if nothing had happened. Kerstin Avemo as Rufina replies at some point with her beautiful soprano: “Blown up, all the dirt!”

Marthaler and his playful ensemble always manage to create wonderful moments: for example, when the theater choir responds to the drum beats from the first movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the melody actually intended for the violin. Or the folk songs that Beethoven arranged and the orchestral pieces in which Sylvain Cambreling lets the Basel Symphony Orchestra shine. This is particularly true, of course, of Kyrie and Agnus Dei from the “Missa Solemnis,” which the choir and orchestra set against the misery of the existence of the characters in this piece. There is a bit of hope after all, “Dona nobis pacem” with the quote from Handel’s “Hallelujah”, peace for the world, including and especially for the homeless, the lonely, the unhappy.

Marthaler’s “Tiefer Graben 8” is a melancholic, sometimes deadly sad, sometimes funny piece. It shows people who are entangled in questions of living, loving and faith, trying to face the possibilities and impossibilities of urban life. And, meaninglessly in the iconic Beethovenian strolling position, i.e. with their hands folded behind their backs, circling through the stage, they sing Beethoven’s last composition, those strange 13 notes of a riddle canon: “We are all wrong, but everyone is wrong in a different way.”

Next performances: January 26th, 27th and 29th.
www.theater-basel.ch