Place and time: Große Villa im Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin an einem Tag von morgens früh bis abends spät in die Nacht

Characters: Actress – Soprano – Pianist – Cleaner (mute)

Each of Helmut Lachenmann's compositions has enriched my inner self, my path to a higher concept of music. It has made the previously unimaginable imaginable to me. It has turned my ears into huge funnels, drawn the incomprehensible into me like a maelstrom, and simultaneously hurled me out into the new, the unknown.

The music of GOT LOST is extraordinarily complex, self-explanatory and multi-layered, so that any attempt at theatricalization is doomed to fail from the outset. So I left Lachenmann's work untouched and added a theatrical piece, with a further person interpreting what is sung in the composition and “playing out” the textual situations in terms of content in a small action-based comedy, with an AUFZUG [elevator] playing a key role. Thus, the musical work is not touched. All that is touched and taken seriously are the processed texts of the composition; they are interpreted and misinterpreted in a theatrical way.

The title unites both parts, GOT LOST as an ambiguous (God lost?) combination of words from the text of the lost property note set to music, where it says: “Today my laundry basket got lost ...” and IN EINEM AUFZUG [in an act/elevator], in German equally ambiguous: as a theater specific definition (ten scenes in one AUFZUG [act] and as the place in which several times the action happens, the AUFZUG [elevator].

The piece is an homage to Helmut Lachenmann. It is a theater about the alienation between music and theater. It is a play about the distance of the world to the art of the present. To endure this distance, the “one forgiving all” has given man the comedy.

(Hans-Peter Jahn)