« How violence is born and where it can lead. » This question, formulated by German author Heinrich Böll as a subtitle to his novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974), is the starting point of this show. A Wehrmacht deserter, and later a committed intellectual in West Germany, Böll wrote in a time when the attacks of the Red Army Faction of Baader and Meinhof spread fear and confusion. But the foremost violence, as Böll postulated, does not lie in the punching fist or the fired gun: it is in words, images, intellectual structures and in society, all powers that wear us down constantly.

We offer to bring this violence into the realm of the visible through two juxtaposed stories, stories of fictional women invented by men, and rewritten by other men over time. Heinrich Böll imagined Katharina Blum, and Shakespeare imagined Ophelia, to question their own masculine points of view, and invite us to the act of trying, in their footsteps, to fathom the perspective of the Other. Katharina Blum became the character of a Volker Schlöndorff movie, for which Hans Werner Henze wrote music. Ophelia has had many new faces, until Heiner Müller made her a symbol of insurrection based on Ulrike Meinhof, who had also been an inspiration for Böll. It is that very distillation process, operated through translations from one language and one medium to another, that we wish to make visible, and it is also how we hope to give words to these characters without speaking in place of them.

Music theatre has the unique power to explore the multiple dimensions of identity, emotion, collective pressure, by replacing univocality and consensus by something apparently similar but actually fundamentally opposite: harmony and counterpoint.