Christian Gerhaher, Juliane Banse, Ivan Ludlow, Sarah Maria Sun, Annette Schönmüller, Philharmonia Zürich, Basler Madrigalisten, Heinz Holliger

Lunea is Heinz Holliger's “dream opera” on the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850), who spent his last six years in an asylum. This two-disc set documents the Zurich Opera production, recorded live in March 2018 with Holliger conducting. Rather than telling a story, the work moves through 23 “leaves” from Lenau's life, recalled out of order as in a dream. At its centre is the baritone Christian Gerhaher, for whom the title role was written.

The opera grew from an earlier Lunea song cycle that Holliger wrote for Gerhaher, setting fragments Lenau wrote in his final years. The playwright Händl Klaus built the libretto around them, adding episodes such as Lenau's attempt at a new life in America in 1832. Three women singers, Juliane Banse, Sarah Maria Sun and Annette Schönmüller, share seven roles, from Lenau's mother to the women he loved. A second baritone plays his brother-in-law and biographer Anton Xaver Schurz. The Philharmonia Zürich and the twelve voices of the Basler Madrigalisten complete the forces. Andreas Werner produced the recording, a co-production of ECM, Opernhaus Zürich and SRF 2 Kultur.

The title itself rearranges the letters of Lenau's name and points toward the moon. Words turn inside out in the same way, so that “Feuer” becomes “reuef” as the leaves burn. The ensemble rarely plays all at once, and the textures stay spare and close to chamber music. The percussion includes a washboard, leaves and baking paper, and cimbalom glissandi open a dream layer of their own. The opening leaf has Lenau intoning his lines over swelling clarinet and resonant gongs. In the eighth, his beloved Sophie and his fiancée Marie sing in imitative counterpoint over jingling bells. In the seventeenth, the world falls to ash and birdsong rises from it.

In Gramophone, Liam Cagney wrote that “Christian Gerhaher is formidable as Lenau, at ease in the atonal idiom.” Andrew Clements in The Guardian found the textures spare and chamber-like, “the mood always intimate yet intense”. Steph Power, reviewing for BBC Music Magazine, called Gerhaher astonishing in a part that moves between song and speech. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Max Nyffeler argued that the drama unfolds so fully in the music that a staging is hardly needed.

Two CDs on ECM New Series, catalogue number ECM New Series 2622/23, released in April 2022, in a slipcase with a 120-page German-English booklet. It holds the full libretto, synopses of all 23 scenes, an essay by Roman Brotbeck and a note by Gerhaher.