Die Nacht By Einar Schleef, Gabriele Gerecke, Bertrand Sauvat and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

»Fear of the dark. Finding a way to delay the breaking and entering of night, the hour at which I tip over, lose my balance. I observe the light switch, if I turn it on, suddenly it is dark outside. I look at myself in the window, my opposing number looks at me at the table. I have two faces, one slips into the other. I see myself sitting down, I circle myself. I torture myself. I will stay home. I will not turn on the light.«

The person speaking here is terrified of the unavoidable: the loss of daylight. She fears the night as a place full of danger, as an unpredictable period of time, during which her surroundings threaten to turn against her. The person speaking here is Gertrud, the omnipresent figure and contradictory fixed point in the work of writer and director Einar Schleef. And it is surprising that she of all people does not emerge in this work, set in the middle of the darkest time of day, by the artist from Sängerhausen.

Die Nacht is a puzzling work. It is neither play, nor poem, nor prose.  Rather it is a literary scenario about the nightly encounters of the vulnerable and the fearful. A phenomenological text behind which Schleef veils his most trusted narrative voice. A bitter Commedia dell’Arte, which recognises no dialogue, only movements of going missing, of depression, of giving up on oneself. Schleef worked together with Gabriele Gerecke and Bertrand Sauvat to conceive this night, and made the decision that Die Nacht would consist principally of one thing: a series of compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He hunted down more than fifty works, and for his score he chose lesser known, incomplete, earthy choruses, canons and songs. Vocal music not from the lofty strata of high culture but from daily life, born of rage, of strain, of exhaustion and the deceptive hopes of the non-privileged. Disparate music for disparate people: this is Die Nacht by Einar Schleef