Detlev Müller-Siemens' opera Die Menschen, in two acts after Walter Hasenclever's play, recorded live at the Theater Basel in February 1993. Hasenclever's scenes are short and closely linked, and the music moves between two extremes, a shrill mechanical drive and gentle interlacing lines, that fuse into a dense polyphony.
Detlev Müller-Siemens was born in Hamburg in 1957 and from 1991 to 2005 taught composition and music theory at the Musik-Akademie Basel. He wrote the libretto himself and composed the opera in 1989-90. The performances of 14 and 16 February 1993 were recorded at the Theater Basel and in the Elektronisches Studio der Musik-Akademie Basel. Michael Boder conducts the Basler Sinfonie-Orchester and the chorus of the Theater Basel, prepared by Werner Nitzer. The large cast includes the baritone Mark Holland as Alexander and Marianne Larsen as Lissi. Madeleine Jalbert sings the fortune-teller and the mother, and the actor Jürgen Stössinger as the murderer, the president and the beggar, among others.
What drew Müller-Siemens to the play were "its shorthand dialogues", often no more than a series of separate words barely expressive of the plot. He described it as "a whirling panopticon in which dreamlike images fly past". The scenes deal with birth, death, power, oppression, law, murder, fear and loneliness, set against withdrawn, quiet moments that act as islands. The first act opens with Ich habe getötet! (I have killed!) and the second includes a pantomime, Geld ist Geld, and a lullaby, Schlafe, schlaf ein!, that lasts ten minutes. One pole of the music is a metallic, cutting shrillness that presses ahead in abrupt thrusts like a mechanical chain. The other is a profusion of gentle lines circling as if weightless.
The opera leaves the play, as its equal, as much room as possible. The cover reproduces Max Ernst's L'Ange du foyer. The booklet essay is by Daniel Charles, with a note by the composer.
2CD, Wergo WER 6253 2, released in 1994, with a 48-page booklet containing the libretto and notes in German, English and French.
