Adam and Eva
(2024) 100' / music theater for 6 singers, an actor, choir, and orchestra
libretto by Anne-May Krüger based on Peter Hacks‘ Adam und Eva, Komödie in einem Vorspiel und drei Akten
"The bite into the apple understood as opportunity and call for creativity"
Roles
Gott actor
Gabriel coloratura soprano
Satanael mezzo-soprano
Eva lyrical soprano
Adam baritone
Unicorn 1 alto
Unicorn 2 bass
Choir (3S 3A 3T 3B)
Orchestra: 0.0.2(II=bcl).0.-0.0.3.0.-2perc.acc.-3.0.3.3.1.-fixed media.live-elec
Commissioned by the Southwest German Radio (SWR) in collaboration with the Landestheater Linz. Premiere May 2nd, 2025 at the SWR Schwetzinger Festspiele with the soloist and choir from the Landestheater Linz, the Experimentalstudio des SWR Freiburg, Andra Moses, stage direction, Mike Svoboda, conductor.
A version for a large orchestra is planned for the 25/26 season.
Scenario
Prelude God and Gabriel, looking at the world. It has become very good, God thinks. Gabriel is in a fix: he has to praise the Creator - but for what? This world is not made of light, "that building material that / Conforms when you think it", but of "stubborn" stuff. God even missed the spherical shape - it is egg-shaped. Gabriel's praise not only has the flaw of being forced, in the end it is also only God's own echo: even Satanael's eternal no's are never anything other "than my own no's / And upturned yes's". God is looking for a counterpart. "Who do you do everything for?"
I. Act Adam and Eve in paradise, in happiness. But can happiness be complete without its opposite? Their view of what surrounds them is almost childlike, as is their "labor of love". They are completely one: "I only know what you know, can only feel / What you can also feel". But something appeared to Eve in a dream...
God walking through his creation. Adam praises, but Eve directs the conversation to two sensitive points: the snake and the apple she dreamed of. And while God caresses the "little daughter" insistently, Gabriel brings unhappy news: Satanael is approaching the world. "No, that's out of the question", God shouts: "He's already here"! And part of the plan.
Then, Gabriel says, I am also part of the plan and must prevent it. The roles are reversed: Gabriel plays Adam's tempter, who was previously warned by Satanael that someone would tempt him. Clumsily and mocked by Satanael, Gabriel tests Adam's obedience. But the warned man acts: Thrown with mud, the false tempter flees.
Act II Gabriel is relieved. He has surrounded hell with a fence of flaming demons - as a protective wall for the world. Satanael is banished. Saved from the conflagration, he carries a snake on his shoulder. Company for Eve. But in the snake's skin: Satanael. During Gabriel's three patrols in paradise, Eve's seduction unfolds. But only in speech and comprehension: "Touch him [...] little fingers are eyes". Eve finally bites into the apple alone, of her own volition, while Gabriel and the snake fight. An intermediate stage is reached: Eve and Adam stand on different positions in the world for the first time. The farce tips over into tragedy, because Adam knows: "Whatever I do, it divides me with / Me or you". Adam's bite into the apple opens up time and space. Everything that exists has its counterpart. His love for Eve is paired with hatred, from now on suffering is part of lust: "An abyss has formed between us, / Unbridgeable, but tempting to shatter / In its deep distance".
Act III Satanael presents the bitten apple to Gabriel with relish. Hell has triumphed - or so it seems. Adam and Eve in the distance, their goings-on observed by the angels, who have to report back to God. Gabriel is horrified by the rawness: "Each one, to find the completely lost self / in him, deeply stirs up the other". And even Satanael seems speechless: "For all my practice in the convulsions / Of the material [...] / I have no words for this. Lord, I must look away".
God calls, people follow hesitantly. This is also an innovation: God must wait. Now that the lie is in the world, Adam uses it to deny the apple bite. The rift is manifest - God and man are divorced. A compassionate Gabriel must pronounce judgment: Of good and evil and of their dying, man must henceforth know. "Paradise has ceased to be". Eve seeks to exonerate Adam, for it was only because of her that he left his God. "And why you?" - "I also for my own sake." - "I had always thought my best litter / Was Adam. Wrong, my best litter is Eve." Providence has been fulfilled: No created being can be in God's image; man must create himself. Unlike the angels, Adam and Eve understood: "Everything will be very good, because it will never be good."
Adam: "The Garden of Eden, I realized, was / Destined for us to go forth from it, / A dear place to which we must cling, / To strive, always in vain, always for it. / And that we may [...] / Never enter it again, guarantees us that / We will remain as we should: free."
A few words about the text from Peter Hacks
Peter Hacks' examination of the Fall of Man focuses on the theme of freedom: only by acting in contradiction to God does man become like him - as the creator of himself - and thus free. The loss of paradise is not a verdict on life in the vale of tears, but a necessary prerequisite for it to be attained at all, namely in striving for the unattainable "state of society, which is not, but which must be imagined as the goal of all rational action" (Hacks, Versuch über das Libretto). A dialectical view of people's entry into the real world. The brittle and unruly matter from which God forms his world has its own stubbornness. But its potential arises from this: the yes now has a value, because the no has also become a possibility. So, as Gabriel complains, this new world is not round - it is uneven. The impossibility of the perfect state, which by definition would also contain its opposite, results in the reality of the imperfect. Both Hacks and God take a loving look at this. According to Gott, creating the world did not cost him any effort, but "a kind of smile".
The transposition of Hacks' play into music theater makes it possible to highlight central topoi for which storytelling in and through music is particularly suitable. These include the time that begins with the Fall of Man: Adam and Eve begin their finite life by biting the apple, while God and the angels remain in timelessness. On a conceptual level, this leads to an opening towards multimedia narrative modes. Video and electronics destabilize the perception of space and time as defined or linear, but also function as a narrative level for subtexts and non-materialized potentials, as they can be linked to those worlds created from light - instead of the material world - favoured by Gabriel. The need to translate Hacks' witty and sharp discourses into music-theatrical modes of representation also leads to the fanning out of the figure of God into a multitude of personal manifestations. The omnipotence of God symbolized in this way also becomes tangible as an obstacle in his permanent omnipresence: "An omnipotent God is also a problem dramaturgically" (Kai Köhler). The linguistically brilliant and differentiated examination of the subject of the Fall of Man thus finds its expression in the multi-layered work architecture of music theater, whose potential for the simultaneous representation of different time structures and conflicting states allows Hacks' original to be grasped and illuminated anew.
About Peter Hacks (1928-2003)
Born in Breslau, Hacks moved to the GDR in 1955. After overcoming Brecht's influence, the approach of a "post-revolutionary dramaturgy" is of central importance to his work. One of his most frequently performed dramas is Gespräch im Hause Stein about the absent Mr. von Goethe (1974). Hacks is the author of dramas, radio plays, essays, poems and children's books.