Creation : 3 June 2010, Schwetzingen Festival, Germany
Commission : State Command, Ircam-Centre Pompidou, Les Percussions de Strasbourg and the Schwetzingen Festival.
Duration : 50′
Effectif : 6 percussionists, 3 singers,
Publishing : Lemoine
Musical theatre after the play by Heiner Müller
“The best thing is a stillborn father. Always pushes the grass over the border. The grass has to be pulled up again and again growing over the border. “This is how the autobiographical story of the writer Heiner Müller opens. Beginning under the Nazi regime and ending in communist rule, The Father goes through a life and grasps a history of Germany. In ten fragments, this abrupt and intimate text explores the relationship between a son and his father, or more precisely their immeasurable distance. After the monodrama Cassandra after Christa Wolf and the opera Galilei adapted by Bertolt Brecht, Michael Jarrell encounters the dense and violent language of the German playwright Heiner Müller, one of the contemporary writers who has had the greatest impact on musical creation – as witnessed by the works of Pascal Dusapin, Wolfgang Rihm, Georges Aperghis and Heiner Goebbels. Under the direction of André Wilms, Le Père stages an actor, a vocal ensemble, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the electronic processing and spatialisation of a musical theatre. A master of minute transitions, Michael Jarrell composes the appearances and disappearances, the shadows and projections of fragments of individual or collective memory.