The Audience

A film maker measures his virtuosity with that of a composer. Modern music and modern visual humour play an idiosyncratic game with sounds and images. The Austrian film maker Edgar Honetschläger worked on the last act of a modern opera by his fellow countryman Peter Ablinger. The term 'opera' hardly covers this spectacle; Ablinger's Opera/Werke cannot be limited to one stage. Certain elements are even off stage. For instance the 'libretto' by Tawada Yoko can only be found in book form and so it isn't sung. Part of the 'staging', a project with 26 seats, was only to be seen on the street in various parts of Graz, the town that commissioned the opera. Ablinger's work can be regarded as an opera about opera, but we can also call it an anti-opera made by a composer who is not opposed to opera, but who thinks the genre should be reinvented. Honetschläger seems to share that view. However, he goes a step further than the composer. The film maker does not reinvent the genre of the opera film, but just simply starts from first principles and provides a playful introduction to a genre that doesn't exist yet. This is a genre in which set, visualisation and filming have exchanged roles. The film maker has become theatre maker. So using the world 'filming' in this context is not necessarily apt.