Jörg Wilkendorf and Salome Kammer)

„Open Wounds“ World Premiere
An Evening of Two Songspiels with Ensemble Modern

Kurt Weill (1900-1950)
Mahagonny Songspiel (1927)
Skript: Bertolt Brecht

Helmut Oehring (*1961)
Die WUNDE Heine (2008/09, UA 2010)
Small epic Songspiel with Interludes
Skript: Stefanie Wördemann
Based on the writings of Heinrich Heine and Helmut Oehring


Soloists: Salome Kammer (soprano), Sylvia Nopper (soprano), Jörg Wilkendorf (electric guitar and vocals),
Atrium Ensemble:
Oliver Uden, Philipp Neumann, Martin Schubach, Frank Schwemmer
Ensemble Modern

Direction and Stage Design: Stefanie Wördemann and Helmut Oehring
Script/Dramaturgy/Visual Design: Stefanie Wördemann and Helmut Oehring
Film/Graphics/Stage director: Hagen Klennert
Music Director: Franck Ollu
Ensemble Modern


With the newly commissioned work Die WUNDE Heine, the Berlin composer Helmut Oehring has entered into the spirit of this year’s festival motto “New Art is True Art”. His piece strives to incorporate new musical forms which can best reflect the most recent social transformations. At the work’s core are two basic elements: the first looks back to Kurt Weill’s and Bertolt Brecht’s collaborative efforts from the 1920s. In this context, Oehring sees his working process, as well as the composition’s content and form, as an reaction to and continuation of Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel.
The new work returns to the original vocal line-up and instrumentation of the earlier masterpiece, adding only solo electric guitar and some electronic sound effects. Poems by Heinrich Heine, taken from all periods of his creative life, form the second textual basis to the work. This poet, known for his acidulous irony, described with astonishing precision the political and cultural processes of the 1920s and 1930s from his standpoint 100 years before. Often unnervingly relevant to current events, the poet described the “end of the artistic era” leading inevitably to a period of technological development. With their Mahagonny Songspiel, the opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and the Threepenny Opera, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht proclaimed their opposition to that eternal bogeyman, Capitalism, and, as predicted by Heine, grasped new materials and technologies to create a new artistic form.
The premiere of Der WUNDE Heine is a wonderful musical companion to Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel, a work which in its day was described as “sensational” and which motivated Weill to join Brecht in creating a new type of opera, one which blended jazz, cabaret chanson and lyrical song in original and brilliant fashion. In so doing a magnificent musical foundation was built for Bertolt Brecht’s memorable texts. Despite the work’s initial success, the songspiel was only performed a second time in its original Baden-Baden version (in 1932) before disappearing unpublished. David Drew, the recently deceased British music publicist and Weill expert, brought out a score of the Mahagonny Songspiel in 1963, leading to the piece’s growing popularity and subsequent international breakthrough.
Ensemble Modern is one of the world’s leading ensembles for new music. After previously appearances at the Kurt Weill Festival in 2007 and 2008, they are now returning to open this year’s festivities. The evening’s French conductor, Franck Ollu, was himself principal horn with Ensemble Modern from 1990 to 2004. He has subsequently found international acclaim on the conductor’s rostrum, premiering numerous works by contemporary composers. The soloist Salome Kammer (soprano) was much appreciated by Dessau’s audiences in 2006 when she appeared in several concerts as our Artist-in-Residence. At this year’s opening concert she will be supported by the male vocal quartet Atrium Ensemble from Berlin, the soprano Sylvia Nopper and the multi-talented guitarist Jörg Wilkendorf. 

An Ensemble Modern Production in collaboration with Frankfurt Opera, the Kurt Weill Festival Dessau | the Anhaltisches Theater Dessau and MusikTriennale Cologne

Commissioned by Ensemble Modern, Frankfurt Opera, the Kurt Weill Festival Dessau and MusikTriennale Köln


With kind support of the NORD/LB,
Landesbank für Sachsen-Anhalt and
of LOTTO Sachsen-Anhalt