-F-a-u-s-t- Margarete // Gretchen wants a full story

In the organizer's words:

Goethe's Faust is undoubtedly one of the best-known stories in European culture. Hardly any other story so exemplifies the human search for the meaning of life. However, Faust also shows in an equally exemplary way how the crises of meaning of the privileged are constantly played off against the existential crises of the less privileged:

It is the monologues of the depressive Faust that fill the pages, while the material existential crisis of the main female character Margarete (or "Gretchen") remains largely untold: As collateral damage of Faust's journey of self-discovery, she becomes pregnant unmarried, putting her social and physical existence at stake - a perhaps hopeless situation.

We think that Gretchen's fate deserves more attention and therefore devote an entire evening to her. But where do we begin to tell the story when there is a huge gap in the story? Even in other art forms such as classical music, which has joyfully processed the Faust material, there are no depictions of Margarete in which the moments of her plot left out by Goethe are described. It is certainly not insignificant that everything that disappears in the gap deals with very physical experiences such as sex, pregnancy, birth and death of the child.

We ask ourselves: what is it about the female - her body, her desire, her life - that is threatening and should be withheld from us? Can we 'tell' the story of a woman's fate that was invented by men without falling into the trap of perpetuating the male imagination of the feminine? Where is Gretchen's own will, where is her rebellion? In this 'chamber music theater' we approach all the topics through Gretchen that should not be spoken about - neither in Goethe's Faust nor in the 'Gretchen songs' of the 19th century. Where the canon is silent, we use new texts and adaptations of the music to offer modern female perspectives. The result is an evening of chamber music, performance and spoken theater with texts from Goethe to the present day, music from Schubert to techno.

The performers are: Daniela Zib, Annika Spegg, Laura Schwind & Niayesh Ebrahimi

The event is sponsored by the Cultural Office of the City of Leipzig.

Price information:

08 EUR = no coal ticket 12 EUR = normal price 15 EUR = subsidized ticket, funding for "no coal" ticket