The first time we took the theatre into a museum was with FROST in 2009. It was with that project that my collaboration with the sound designer and live electrical engineer Wolfgang Musil began. We have been following and fine-tuning that approach ever since, defining acoustic spaces in the respective architecture – whether a museum, gallery or theatre – as an essential stylistic component of our work. Musil himself describes his role in our collaborations as that of an ‘acoustic stage designer’.

Wolfgang Musil is a partner to actors like Andreas Patton in FROST, Alexandra Sommerfeld, Christina Scherrer and Sarah Melis in SCHATTEN (Eurydike sagt) by Elfriede Jelinek, and Alexandra Sommerfeld in the new English-language version SHADOW. EURYDICE SAYS, translated by Gitta Honegger. He amplifies their voices, allowing them to reclaim their intimacy in museum and industrial spaces that have too much reverberation, making every listener feel like Andreas Patton, Alexandra Sommerfeld, Christina Scherrer or Sarah Melis were talking to them and them alone. Musil dislocates their lines by projecting them from somewhere other than the speaker’s position. He steers the audience’s hearing, at times in surprising ways. With his acoustic interventions, he plays no small part in shaping and defining the character of the evening. Never illustrative, his tones, sounds and variations of motifs emerge on an equal footing with the language of Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek or Samuel Beckett: the two combine to form Gesamtmusik – or total music. What makes this possible is the fact that Sabine Mitterecker and Wolfgang Musil conceive of these authors’ texts as scores, as sheet music.