Eines Tages alltäglich (2020)
(for female voice and ensemble)

Eines Tages alltäglich was premiered in 2021 at the staged concert of the same name in collaboration with Matthias Rebstock at Schloßmediale Werdenberg.

The concert was an invitation to take a stroll through Werdenberg Castle, focusing on the magic of everyday life. Music, scenic situations and texts by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Kunert, Ángel González and Julio Cortázar were composed in the castle to create a coherent evening in which seven musicians took on a variety of roles.

In Eines Tages alltäglich, which is based on Günter Kunert's 1975 poem “Über die große Sache”, we see a table at which two drummers and a singer are making music with kitchen utensils. This situation is associated with three people preparing a meal – yet it is a highly stylized image. At the same time, the rather realistic, metrically treated language of the poem is contrasted with very lyrical passages that are reminiscent of Monteverdi's madrigal “Quell'augellin che canta” (This singing little bird) in an equally stylized manner. The bird as a symbol of the simple, the everyday is found in Künert's poem in form of a blackbird, in Monteverdi's madrigal and at one point in the work also in the “instruments”.

The play, like the entire evening, poses the question of where each person stands with their “small” everyday needs, wishes and desires in today's highly polarized world, and how the big ideologies relate to individual flesh-and-blood people (and vice versa).

Elena Mendoza