Melancholia

Last year, Sebastian Nübling (1960) and GOЯKI Theatre received many plaudits for their production Der Untergang der Nibelungen. This year, the German director returns to Amsterdam staging, together with Ives Thuwis (1963), Melancholia, a music theatre performance about finitude, mortality, melancholy and depression for twenty performers and the Swiss La Cetra baroque ensemble.

For modern people, melancholia is a negative state of mind which borders on depression and therefore needs to be cured as quickly as possible. In our competitive contemporary society, worrying and agonising too much is considered to interfere with reaching our targets and deadlines, and to prevent us from fulfilling our dreams. The young German poetry slammer Julia Engelmann (1992) expressed this sentiment aptly in her poem One Day, which unleashed a small revolution in the spring of 2013, attracting more than eight million hits on YouTube: 'One Day, Baby, we'll be old and we'll think of all the stories we could have told.' These lines describe the melancholia of a generation plagued by apathy, a generation of young people who see their dreams of a splendid, meaningful and exciting life stifled before they have even begun, having resigned themselves to the fact that nobody is really interested anyway.

Still, melancholia has not always been synonymous with apathy, according to Nübling and Thuwis. This is why in Melancholia they contrast modern-day youth's alleged apathy with the notion of melancholia from the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, heartbreak and sorrow were seen as an important source of inspiration. Melancholy man had two sides to him. He was an outsider, but also a genius who understood the art of making music which transcends personal grief and brings solace to the soul.

The works performed in Melancholia speak volumes, ranging from madrigals and arias by Claudio Monteverdi to John Dowland's sorrowful lute songs and the expressive arias composed by the seventeenth-century Venetian composer Barabra Strozzi. The English countertenor Tim Mead (1981) takes centre stage, accompanied by the musicians of La Cetra. A special mention goes to Hunc ego from Domenico Mazzocchi's Lamentum Matris Euryali, in which the Roman composer experiments with microtonal scales. The instrumental intermezzos include Johann Jakob Frohberger's Meditation faite sur ma mort future, sonatas and toccatas by Dario Castello and Giovanni Valentini and a passacaglia by Biagio Marini. The musical direction is by the Italian conductor Andrea Marcon (1963).

In Melancholia, twenty young performers are joined by the La Cetra ensemble's singers and musicians to explore the positive side of sorrow and gloom, as well as the relationship between melancholy and our own feeling of mortality, a theme that pervades the philosophical discussion of the subject throughout history. Sebastian Nübling's and Ives Thuwis' imagery and Muriel Gerstner's set design make Melancholia into an original, physical brand of music theatre, blending movement, space, sound and design.