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Composing in red, yellow and blue — »There is a soprano and a tenor, but the soprano isn’t in love with the tenor and there’s no bass who finds it boring.« The Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, a key figure in the contemporary scene, does not focus on conflict and emotion in his opera of ideas De Materie, but on detachment.  Texts and treatises on mysticism, physics, philosophy and aesthetics reflect how the spirit engages with material while the music immediately places the individual stories featured at a distance from world history.

De Materie is a critique of the mental space which we call opera and which determines how we listen to, see and feel music.Heiner Goebbels directs Andriessen’s work in the Duisburg Kraftzentrale, a space congenial to experiencing its interplay of proximity and distance.