»Melusine« von Aribert Reimann

In the organizer's words:

A young woman takes a stand against the ongoing destruction of nature. However, her plan fails because of the most human of all feelings: love.

Melusine suffers from her husband's narrow-mindedness and her mother's bourgeois arrogance. The young woman finds an alternative world in an overgrown park where Pythia rules as "Queen of the Willows". When the park is to make way for a castle, Pythia incites Melusine to resist. Equipped with a fishtail that gives her an irresistible attraction, Melusine seduces numerous workers involved in the construction. However, she is unable to prevent the loss of the park. At the opening of the palace, Melusine falls in love with the builder, Count von Lusignan. Pythia then swears revenge for Melusine's betrayal.

As a creature that comes out of the water and brings fire, the figure of Melusine has wandered through European literary history for centuries. In the early 1920s, French playwright Yvan Goll transposed her myth into a capitalist reality, dissecting its double standards with razor-sharp precision. Aribert Reimann takes up both the grotesque and poetic elements of the original text. At the beginning, he portrays the title character as a restless idealist who has only one musical weapon at her disposal in the fight against rampant indifference: the beauty of coloratura. Melusine only finds audible peace when she meets the Count of Lusignan. However, the elegiac utopia of love between the two proves to be deceptive: apocalyptic soundscapes at the end herald a natural catastrophe that not only drags Melusine and the Count into the abyss.