Following the great successes of the last seasons with his multimedia operas Le Malentendu and Les Rois Mages, Fabián Panisello developed his new opera Die Judith von Shimoda from a libretto by Juan Lucas based on Bertolt Brecht's stage play - a text with, in turn, its very own story:
In 1929, the Japanese author Yūzō Yamamoto published Nyonin Aishi, Tōjin Okichi Monogatari, a drama based on the true story of the Japanese woman Okichi Saito. As a young woman, she was pressured for diplomatic reasons to serve as a geisha for the first US consul in Japan and was subsequently cast out of society - and subsequently revered as a hero in view of her actions, which were perceived as patriotic. The text came into Bertolt Brecht's hands in English translation in 1940, when he spent three months on the estate of the Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki during his exile.
Brecht's collaborator Margarete Steffin translated the text into German; Brecht then worked with Wuolijoki to adapt the play for a stage version that would work in Europe, but this did not materialise during Brecht's lifetime. Only five completed scenes were found in his estate instead of the eleven planned. A Finnish translation of the missing scenes was found in Hella Wuolijoki's estate - the complete version compiled from this material by Hans Peter Neureuter was published in German in 2006, after the parts left by Brecht had first been staged at the Berliner Ensemble in 1997.
In Fabián Panisello's reading of The Judith of Shimoda - with the title Brecht equated the figure of Okichi with the Old Testament Judith - the composer transfers the alienation effect characteristic of Brecht to sonic means. By means of a specially developed sound-space system, various acoustic spaces are created in which - in the production stage directed by Carmen Kruse - eight soloists as well as the Vienna Chamber Choir and the amadeus ensemble wien perform. The story of Okichi is shown as a narrative about the defence of the dignity of the individual, embodied by a remarkable woman who is spiritually obliterated by the indifference of a state that only pursues its own pragmatic interests and by a society that lacks fundamental respect for women.
Following the two performances on 17 and 19 August in Bregenz, the co-production with Neue Oper Wien can be experienced at Vienna's Theater Akzent on 2, 4, 7 and 9 November 2023.
