Gessnerallee
Zürich

When musician and music theorist Andreas Werckmeister laid the foundation for the well-tempered piano in 1682, he had already noticed that in the prevailing era the previously valid order had shifted or vanished to such an extent that it was questionable as to whether it had ever existed in the first place.

Appealing to cosmic and alchemical systems of order, Werckmeister tried to bring unity to the previous confusion of European instrumental temperaments. His writings, which bear such sonorous titles as «The Organ Rehearsal» or brief descriptions like «…how a clavier should be well-tempered» or «On the Dignity of the Noble Art of Music, Its Use and Misuse» reveal a deep-seated human longing to discover order in the chaos of creation and the failure to actually maintain this order in at that time. Doubting the possibility to unambiguously describe the world and concern about the loss of a mutual underlying sentiment are also what drive Swiss theatre artist Thom Luz in his development of a music theater piece for the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin. Working in cooperation with the Gessnerallee, Luz is evolving an evening of fluctuating music for five piano tuners in search of the fixed point from which the world can be understood based on Werckmeister’s incomprehensible texts and Charles Ives’ quarter tone compositions.

We are pleased that Luz will be performing three open rehearsals of the unfinished work at the Gessnerallee months before the production will be officially premiered in Berlin.