Zusammenstoß

The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel described 17 May 2010 as “The day when the world went haywire”, commenting further: “Suicides, sex orgies and sacraments: when Halley’s comet appeared in May 1910, the world went completely off the rails, even without a direct hit by the comet. The media generated a state of mass panic, science created confusion, and postcards documented the fantasies of the age, oscillating between doom-laden anxiety and exaggeration.”

In 1927, Kurt Schwitters wrote the libretto for an absurd Dadaist opera with a hilarious and totally wacky story. He based his work on a bizarre event that initially unfolded at the University of Heidelberg in 1910 and swiftly plunged the world between America and India into a state of insanity.

I was overjoyed to be offered a commission by the Theatre der Stadt Heidelberg for a work involving all genres of theatre. During the otherwise dismal period of the Coronavirus pandemic, I took great pleasure in composing a fictitious apocalypse of the world, accompanied by laughter and giggles, which - plop - suddenly didn’t take place after all, instead culminating in a wedding. Ludger Vollmer