Dangerous Alliances
Berlin’s off-music theatre is quaking: Nico and the Navigators link Müller’s dystopian endgame „Quartett" with Janáček’s string quartets
The performance is truly too beautiful to be real: “Man and woman and woman and man / reach toward divinity.” Even in the Bible, where God in heaven famously plays a leading role, significant doubts arose centuries earlier about Schikaneder’s anachronistic concept of love; in Matthew 5:28 we find both the specific occasion and the general rationale: “But I tell you, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Countless touches, countless events have transpired.
And who knows this better than Vicomte Valmont and his companion, the Marquise de Merteuil—the diabolical duo from Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel "Les Liaisons dangereuses", which Heiner Müller honored two centuries later in his play „Quartett", transforming it into a dialectically dense dystopia in which horrific regression turns into fascination. Few plays are as cynically nihilistic and brutally inhuman in dialogue as this one. Even fewer replace every question mark with a period, as here. All doubts are removed; the claustrophobic setting—both a “salon before the French Revolution” and a “bunker after the Third World War”—and its inhabitants know no future. Everything is broken. Fascinatingly broken. An endgame with two protagonists who feel Lacanian jouissance only in imitating one another (hence the title Quartett). Thus, in the destruction of all they may once have longed for.
Luca Francesconi set Müller’s piece to music in 2011 as an opera in thirteen scenes, writing the libretto himself. Following Rihm’s „Hamletmaschine" (1983) and Dusapin’s „Medeamaterial"(1992), this was another successful attempt to translate the playwright’s hermetic text blocks into sound. In all three cases, dissonance functions as both musical and semantic-semiotic idiom; the stage works embrace Müller’s rhetorical rigor. The music theatre company Nico and the Navigators, always searching for alternative forms and formats, now takes a different path. In their new work, somewhat awkwardly titled "Quartett zum Quadrat", they interlace Müller’s play with Leoš Janáček’s two string quartets.
The dramaturg Andreas Hillger’s idea (who, reportedly, left the project after a dispute with director Nicola Hümpel, after which Sergio Morabito stepped in) is not without urgency: Janáček’s string quartets deal, more or less directly, with precarious love affairs ending in misfortune. The first piece is named after Tolstoy’s grim tale "The Kreutzer Sonata", in which a certain Pozdnyshev kills his wife upon discovering her affair with the violinist Truchatschevsky; the second quartet, "Intimate Letters", is a homage to Kamila Stösslová, nearly forty years his junior, in whom the composer fell hopelessly in love in the late autumn of his life.
The question remains: how can this—especially with the additional musical textures provided by Paul Hübner’s trumpet and percussion compositions, and a choreographic layer from the dance duo Martin Buczkó and Yui Kawaguchi—be made theatrically convincing? Director Hümpel (also responsible for the costumes) and set designer Oliver Proske seek salvation at Berlin’s Radialsystem through visual overload. This produces images of astonishing poetry (especially Proske’s “bunker” videos and mirrored characters are highly imaginative) and, in the intense, intonationally unsettling interpretation of the Kiss Quartet, numerous expressive moments—but the core, Müller’s play, is put at serious risk.
Not only does the work fragment into small mosaic pieces, contrary to Müller’s intention; „Quartett" allows for pauses and fermatas but resists dissolving its hermeticism. Even more problematic is the awkward characterization. Annedore Kleist convincingly portrays Merteuil’s tormented existence, but never truly embodies the Marquise as a nihilist, a wicked woman hating her own decay—a shortcoming emphasized as the actress more convincingly plays the coquettish “chick” Volange. Kleist lacks the hardness, the cold malice Müller wrote into the Marquise (which Glenn Close brilliantly embodied alongside the mischievous John Malkovich in Stephen Frears’ legendary 1994 film adaptation). Martin Clausen, playing Vicomte Valmont, is far more convincing (both wear furs—he in lambskin, she in mink and leopard print, since they “rub against each other’s hides”). A degenerate snob capable of both seduction and debauchery, lord and servant, man and woman. Hilariously comic as he mimics Madame de Tourvel as a Catholic statue—but precisely in this comedy lies danger: it softens what neither Müller, Tolstoy, nor Janáček made unequivocally clear: disillusioned, disruptive, and obstructive relationships yield nothing but pain. When Clausen as Valmont drinks the theater-blood-filled goblet and (perhaps unintentionally) slips into slapstick, it feels somehow wrong—a slapstick amid the tragedy of life.
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