Music as Excess

Die Reise and Neo-Baroque Aesthetics in Opera from the 1960s

Abstract

Lars Johan Werle’s and Lars Runsten’s opera Die Reise (Hamburg 1969) is characterized by pluralism of musical styles. The focus in this article is on how the pluralism is related to the other media in the opera, and what effects it is expected to have on the audience in the performance situation. My claim is that the stylistic pluralism is manifested in ways that connects the opera to the neo-baroque aesthetics that has been brought forth by scholars such as Omar Calabrese, Angela Ndalianis, and Cristina Degli-Esposti. It is a device that disrupts the narrative by way of attracting the attention of the audience. With an abundance of figurative representation, the music makes Die Reise an opera of ‘excess’.