Heiner Müller’s „Quartet” meets Leoš Janáček’s late string quartets
With the staging of Leoš Janáček’s String Quartets No. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata” and No. 2 “Intimate Letters” (1854–1928), we continue our collaboration with the renowned Kuss Quartet, which began to great acclaim with the Beethoven evening “Force & Freedom”. The fact that both quartets—premiered in 1924 and 1928, like Beethoven’s adapted quartets—belong to their composer’s late period and are among the Kuss Quartet’s declared favourites, inspired this programming choice.
In his first engagement with the “royal discipline” of chamber music, Janáček drew inspiration from a famous work by Beethoven – the “Kreutzer Sonata”, dedicated to violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. Janáček’s musical reflection on Leo Tolstoy’s novella of the same name, which deals with love, sex, jealousy, and murder, allows for a thematic connection with Heiner Müller’s „Quartett”. Dramaturgically, the juxtaposition of the “Kreutzer Sonata” with Janáček’s second quartet, composed five years later, is particularly intriguing. Here the 74-year-old composer appears as a passionate lover, hopelessly devoted to the much younger Kamila Stösslová, to whom he wrote these “Intimate Letters” as tokens of his deepest longing and affection. The inversion of a possible relationship trajectory within Janáček’s catalogue – beginning with the murderous jealousy of a betrayed husband and culminating in the rapturous devotion of an enamoured man – forms a fascinating mirror game.
Heiner Müller’s play „Quartett” (1980/81) inverts Janáček’s principle of duplication: while the composer expanded Tolstoy’s sonata for violin and piano into a work for four strings, Müller (1929–1995) condensed the characters of Choderlos de Laclos’ famous epistolary novel “Les Liaisons dangereuses” (1782) into two voices. He nevertheless titled the piece Quartett, as his protagonists exchange and blur their (gender) roles – a structure that, like Janáček’s “Intimate Letters”, arises from intimate correspondence.
It is a hall of mirrors of human desire and suffering, in which Janáček’s music becomes both impulse and commentary on Müller’s literary composition. With a pair of actors, a pair of dancers, and the Kuss Quartet, we create a production that, amid profound political and social upheaval, explores the questionable refuge of the private sphere – which ultimately proves to be a battlefield of mutual destruction. These unassimilated social contradictions corrode the individual from within.
The young and versatile percussionist Lorenzo Riessler and the virtuoso trumpeter Paul Hübner lend the text both percussive sharpness and electronically enhanced resonance.
On 30 December 2025, the 30th anniversary of Heiner Müller’s death will be commemorated.
Martin Buczko
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Yui Kawaguchi
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Jana Kuss-Nickel
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Oliver Wille
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Annedore Kleist
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William Coleman
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Martin Clausen
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Mikayel Hakhnazaryan
Annedore Kleist
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Jana Kuss-Nickel
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William Coleman
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Mikayel Hakhnazaryan
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Oliver Wille
Jana Kuss-Nickel
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William Coleman
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Martin Clausen
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Oliver Wille
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Mikayel Hakhnazaryan
Yui Kawaguchi
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Martin Buczko
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Jana Kuss-Nickel
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Oliver Wille
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Annedore Kleist
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William Coleman
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Martin Clausen
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Mikayel Hakhnazaryan
It is a pleasure to watch Martin Clausen and above all Annedore Kleist in the roles of the seasoned seduction monster Valmont and his embittered accomplice Merteuil. […] The string quartet, dressed in cassocks, drops in passages from Leoš Janáček’s quartets Kreutzer Sonata and Intimate Letters, which seem less to underscore the action than to comment on it in real time – nervous and feverish, yearningly post-Romantic, shimmering, cool or luxuriant. Nico and the Navigators want more. They complicate their Laclos–Müller adaptation with a tiltable glass set element onto which 2D and 3D image sequences are projected. It is sophisticated and offers plenty for the eye. Movements that the dance duo Yui Kawaguchi and Martin Buczko execute lying on the floor appear almost weightless in the tilting mirror: lying is flying. […] The performers on stage spare neither themselves nor their audience. The strength of the production lies in the fact that, despite everything, it never loses its playfulness and sardonic humour.
„Quartett", Heiner Müller’s distillation of Choderlos de Laclos’ "Dangerous Liaisons" – about the cynical power and erotic games of the corrupt court society in pre-revolutionary France – already pushes things to the limit of what is bearable. But Nico and the Navigators want more.
Why “squared”? Heiner Müller’s Quartett is already, in itself, about as much as one can endure: this distillate of Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons, this cynical sexual campaign of annihilation stripped of the veiling elegance of Laclos’ epistolary novel. Nico and the Navigators top it at Berlin’s Radialsystem – or rather, they attempt the quadrature of this vicious game. Theatre to the power of dance to the power of music. It is too much.
Animalistic hunting instinct
It is a pleasure to watch Martin Clausen and above all Annedore Kleist in the roles of the seasoned seduction monster Valmont and his embittered accomplice Merteuil. One would dearly like to say that Heiner Müller’s play has aged badly in the 21st century – after #MeToo and Epstein, in view of the ongoing scandal that is Trump and the horror at the crimes committed against Gisèle Pelicot and far too many other women. But Valmont’s perfidy and Merteuil’s cynicism still hit the blackest of nerves – is what Valmont does really so very different from today’s grooming? – and Clausen and Kleist are simply very good in their shifting roles, with her being the better Valmont than he is a Madame Tourvel.
For as long as they are not taking their clothes off, both of them are draped in a lot of dead animal: fox fur collars, fur coats, snakeskin boots, as if the mercilessly animalistic nature of their hunting instinct still had to be underlined. Here too: it is too much.
Weightless in the tilting mirror
For the evening, the chamber play of the Kleist–Clausen duo plus the Kuss Quartett ensemble would have been more than enough. The string quartet, dressed in cassocks, drops in passages from Leoš Janáček’s quartets Kreutzer Sonata and Intimate Letters, which seem less to underscore the action than to comment on it in real time – nervous and feverish, yearningly post-Romantic, shimmering, cool or luxuriant. Nico and the Navigators want more. They complicate their Laclos–Müller adaptation with a tiltable glass set element that functions in turn as mirror, as simple pane of glass and as projection surface onto which 2D and 3D image sequences are played. It is sophisticated and offers plenty for the eye. Movements that the dance duo Yui Kawaguchi and Martin Buczko execute lying on the floor appear almost weightless in the tilting mirror: lying is flying.
Striking effects, rumbling sounds
In other scenes, Kawaguchi and Buczko wander through a virtual staircase, pantomiming their way down steps that exist only on film. Striking effects, but ones that could just as easily be used in any other piece. They contribute little to the interpretation of the Quartett constellation of characters. And as if the Janáček string quartets could not carry the piece, as if the Kuss Quartett – and the additionally deployed trumpet-and-percussion duo – were not enough, the acoustic interstices have to be permanently filled with ominously rumbling sounds. It is too much.
Sardonic humour
Those who expose themselves to the Laclos–Müller duo know what they are in for: the piece leaves nothing out, from sexual perversion to desecration of corpses and faecal disgust, all the way to the suicide of Madame Tourvel in an alcohol- and blood-soaked frenzy. The performers on stage spare neither themselves nor their audience. The strength of the production is that, despite everything, it never loses its sense of play, its sardonic humour. Its weakness is the excess.
Review round-up
Sören Kittel of the Berliner Morgenpost (5 December 2025) encountered an “exuberantly powerful production in images and sound”, indeed an “explosion of creativity” at the Radialsystem. Heiner Müller’s “crude texts” were, he wrote, “presented precisely and in all their rawness”.
For Andreas Montag of the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung (6 December 2025) it was “a very strong evening”. The team confronts Müller’s text “with the emotional string quartets of Leoš Janáček (played live by the Kuss Quartet), jazz by Paul Hübner (trumpet, sounds) and Lorenzo Riessler (percussion), as well as the furious dancing of Martin Buczko and Yui Kawaguchi)”.
[…] cruel and comic. Material of a Shakespearean cut. And what a magnificent evening Nicola Hümpel (concept and direction), Oliver Proske (set and video), and dramaturg Sergio Morabito have crafted from it. “Quartett zum Quadrat” is the title of their interpretation of Müller’s text. […] In the current production, Annedore Kleist (Merteuil) and Martin Clausen (Valmont) shoulder the largest burden. They do so with brilliance: two undead beings for whom intimacy holds neither secrets nor dignity […] A very powerful evening.
Pure despair — that is what Heiner Müller’s drama “Quartett” is about. The attempt to numb existential emptiness with cynicism and habitual greed is at an all-time high. Müller, who died 30 years ago in Berlin, arranged his “Quartett” (based on the epistolary novel “Gefährliche Liebschaften” by Choderlos de Laclos from 1782) in a space ranging from a “Salon vor der französischen Revolution” to a “Bunker nach dem 3. Weltkrieg”.
Cruel exposure
An endgame of civilisation, in which the two acting figures (who exchange roles and also embody two additional characters) strip themselves bare to recognisability — cruel and comic. Material of a Shakespearean cut. And what a magnificent evening Nicola Hümpel (concept and direction), Oliver Proske (set and video), and dramaturg Sergio Morabito have crafted from it. “Quartett zum Quadrat” is the title of their interpretation of Müller’s text. The team confronts it onstage with the emotional string quartets of Leoš Janáček (performed live by the Kuss Quartet), jazz by Paul Hübner (trumpet, sounds) and Lorenzo Riessler (percussion), and the furious dance of Martin Buczko and Yui Kawaguchi.
Nico & The Navigators were founded in 1998 by Nicola Hümpel and her partner Oliver Proske at the Bauhaus Dessau. Based in Berlin since 1999, they have developed an internationally acclaimed form of music theatre defined by an exciting collaboration of language, music, and choreographic interventions.
Brilliant performers
In the current production, which has now premiered at Radialsystem Berlin, Annedore Kleist (Merteuil) and Martin Clausen (Valmont) indeed carry the largest burden. They succeed brilliantly: they embody two undead beings for whom intimacy holds no secret and no dignity. Pleasure becomes an end in itself, a way to escape the horror of facing themselves. Their hunger for power turns them into perpetrator and perpetrator of two women, one of whom (played by Martin Clausen, the actor portraying Valmont) will die.
A very powerful evening.
[…] such combinations are precisely the speciality of Nico and the Navigators, in order playfully to overcome conventional modes of performance and, in the process, to blow works apart. […] One technical and visual high point is provided by Oliver Proske’s mirror wall, which can also be a screen for close-ups of the faces of Valmont and Merteuil, and furthermore a window into a virtual 3D world in which the bunker suggested by Müller can be entered – and in which the two dancers, at one point, disappear entirely with their whole bodies. Very impressive.
“Quartett zum Quadrat” after Heiner Müller and two string quartets by Leoš Janáček – concept, direction, costumes Nicola Hümpel, set and video technology Oliver Proske, music Kuss Quartett
The idea of combining Heiner Müller’s play, often staged in the German-speaking world, with the two rather rarely performed string quartets by Leoš Janáček seems abstract and enticing at the same time. Quartett is a two-person play in which a man and a woman, in the course of a relentless battle of the sexes, also play two other women for each other, swapping genders, until the man, dying, is defeated in the role of a woman – in Müller’s mocking self-assessment, a mixture of Jean Genet’s The Maids and the Peter Alexander film farce Charley’s Aunt from 1963. Janáček’s Kreutzer Sonata, in turn, goes back to a story by Tolstoy in which Beethoven’s sonata of the same title is the accompanying music to an adultery story, in which the Czech composer above all felt the misfortune of the punished woman. To square these two pieces of contrasting temperament, as devised by Andreas Hillger, dramaturg of Nico and the Navigators, is therefore an enormous leap, or rather a split.
On the other hand, such combinations are precisely the speciality of Nico and the Navigators, in order playfully to overcome conventional modes of performance and, in the process, to blow works apart. Thus at first two figures lie entangled in one another under a gauze hood as if in a snakes’ egg, a slanting surface above them serving as a mirror that doubles them both. The Kuss Quartet, with Jana Kuss (violin), plays the first movement of the Kreutzer Sonata standing – the whole arrangement highly artificial and cool.
With the entrance of Annedore Kleist as Merteuil and Martin Clausen as Valmont, a different note is struck by their costumes. In Müller’s text they consider “rubbing their furs against each other” as an expression for animalistic sex. Nicola Hümpel has costumed Merteuil with snakeskin boots and a fox collar of the kind worn decades ago by pensioners who could not afford a fur coat. Clausen’s Valmont, by contrast, wears Atze Schröder-style aviator glasses and a sort of polar bear coat as a sign of his run-down life as a seducer. Admittedly, Müller’s stage direction “a salon before the French Revolution, a bunker after the Third World War” leaves the placing of the characters largely open, but here trash is supposed to caricature what is inside – which in turn stands in a certain contrast to Müller’s deliberately obscene language that celebrates every humiliation. To match this, or perhaps rather not, Clausen plays a drunken, dying Valmont at the end, half slurring his words.
But there are also levels of a different format. When, for example, Martin Buczko and Yui Kawaguchi, as male and female dancers, double the other couple to form a real quartet. Or when Paul Hübner on trumpet and Lorenzo Riessler on percussion set a sound world of tensely jazzy tones against the Kuss Quartet. Disparateness thus seems to be the principle.
One technical and visual high point is provided by Oliver Proske’s mirror wall, which can also be a screen for close-ups of the faces of Valmont and Merteuil, and furthermore a window into a virtual 3D world in which the bunker suggested by Müller can be entered – and in which the two dancers, at one point, disappear entirely with their whole bodies. Very impressive.
However, this technical and musical opulence does not lead to a thorough exploration of the play, for the text here is only one part of a vast apparatus which, with the cameras, also forces the acting style of the two characters towards them and makes the music appear dominant. It certainly has great visual value, but the almost two and a half hours (probably the longest Quartett production there has ever been) nonetheless slow down the impact that ought to emanate from Müller’s play.
Content Note
The production addresses themes including psychological and sexualised violence, abuse of power and destructive relationships. Stage blood is used on stage. Certain scenes may be disturbing or distressing for some audience members.
A production by Nico and the Navigators, funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.
In cooperation with Radialsystem. The original text is used with the permission of henschel SCHAUSPIEL Theaterverlag Berlin.
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