When I Die
After six years and fifty performances i.a. in Berlin, Reykjavik, Marseille, Paris, Jerusalem, Rotterdam, and Venice, finally back in Zurich!
A true story: Rosemary Brown, widow and mother of two children, lives in a row house in Balham, South London. In November 1964, the ghost of Franz Liszt visits her and asks her to dictate some pieces of music that he was not able to note down during his lifetime. A little later, Johann Sebastian Bach approachs her with the same request – and immediately afterwards, Johannes Brahms, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy, Robert Schumann, John Lennon, and Ludwig van Beethoven. In the years that follows, Brown always gets up at six thirty in the morning, has breakfast, and then takes musical dictation from deceased composers from eight until two o’clock and from three until six o’clock. The results of these sessions include i.a. a forty-page sonata and twelve songs by Schubert, a fantasy impromptu in three movements by Chopin, and two sonatas and the tenth and eleventh symphonies by Beethoven. Rosemary Brown died in London in 2001.
In When I Die: Eine Geistergeschichte mit Musik [A Ghost Story with Music] by the Zurich musician and director Thom Luz, these scores serve as the initial material for a merry ghostly evening for three musicians, one actor, and one actress.
Press:
«WHEN I DIE is truly magical. At its core, the evening has a whiff of death and sadness, portends of melancholy, loss, and loneliness, but at the same time sounds so beautiful that one becomes internally supple, yet leaves the theater light in spirit.»
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 29 November 2013
«One of the few in the theater to be trusted to satisfy insatiable desires is Thom Luz, a 31-year-old Swiss who speaks directly to our senses with his musical soirees and can thereby create a pure state of the present. With WHEN I DIE Luz proves that he doesn’t have to cower in the face of the big names of the international festival business.»
Tagesanzeiger, Andreas Tobler, 29 November 2013
«WHEN I DIE envelops the audience like a refined lover, lures, pushes back, confuses, reconciles, and consoles. In short, this total work of art seduces the public according to all the rules of the arts and obviously succeeds with great ease ensuring nothing less than completely falling in love with it. In fifteen years, I have never experienced anything like such an effect (excluding any gaps of my memory).»
P.S. Magazine, Thierry Frochaux, 19 December 2013
Credits