The path to new languages: Geblendeter Augenblick

Anton Weberns Tod (Blinding moment. Anton Webern's death) from Gert Jonke to Tam Teatromusica

Abstract

In his novel Geblendeter Augenblick. Anton Webern's Tod (1996) Gert Jonke, one of the most celebrated Austria's author (1955-2009), reshapes and “recomposes” the historical final moment of Anton Webern’s life as a musical one. An accomplished musician as well as a writer and playwright, Jonke orchestrates language as a music composition. The analysis of the “play-concert” Un Abbaglio by Tam Teatromusica (2006), a “translation into performance” of Jonke's novel, aims at investigating both the relationship with the italian translation and the consonances with the poetics and the linguistic means of the author. The way Tam Teatromusica employs sound, lighting and projected images on the stage corresponds to the poetic features of Jonke's work: an anti-narrative structure, a particular rhythm obtained through repetition of themes, the amplification of fragments, the condensation of images of the past and the present, a language made of stratifications and ambivalences. Un abbaglio intertwines the theme of memory and images from Anton Webern's biography, inquiring into the meaning and the destiny of art.