From a radically different world: the layers in Beat Furrer’s opera “Das große Feuer” (“The Great Fire”), based on the novel “Eisejuaz” by Sara Gallardo, are many and diverse. The world premiere takes place in Zurich in March 2025.

Beat Furrer’s most recent opera “Das große Feuer” draws on the novel “Eisejuaz” by the Argentinian writer Sara Gallardo (1931–88). In 1960 she researched the living conditions of an indigenous tribe in northern Argentina and turned her conversations with the Indian Lisandro Vega, known as Eisejuaz, into the basis of a magnificent linguistic work of art. The Austrian writer Thomas Stangl has based his libretto on the novel, which was published in 1971.

Eisejuaz narrates his story in an interior monologue, in leaps of time, overlaying layers of reality and dreams. A “voice of the Lord” has told him to save a human life. He meets a white man named Paqui, whom he cares for to the point of self-sacrifice. In his two protagonists Eisejuaz and Paqui, Beat Furrer sees “a Beckett-like combination: in harsh, rhythmically concise language, Sara Gallardo creates images of a postcolonial society in the northern Argentinian town of Salta. For Eisejuaz, who works there in a sawmill, trees and animals are creatures with whom he is constantly in dialogue. Paqui allows himself to be served and has nothing left but contempt for Eisejuaz whom he calls a ‘dirty Indian’. My opera is concerned with the destructive relationship between the two protagonists, their completely different views of the world and their inability to have a dialogue on an equal basis. Sara Gallardo’s novel gives expression, with deeply shocking clarity, to how much our relationship to others is inscribed in the relationship of the conqueror to the conquered, whether it be in our relationship to nature or to people of other cultures.”

Eisejuaz’s fate reads as a continuous “scandalous event”. It is the story of colonial violence. After his family has fled because of hunger from the forests into the city of white men, he is brought up in a Christian mission. He works there as an overseer and later – of all things – in a sawmill, that is on the destruction of his natural habitat. After the early death of his wife he leaves the mission and the sawmill. In the realisation that “el monte” is destroyed, that the inhabitants are dying of hunger or from the diseases of the white men, or are at the mercy of their interests unprotected, Eisejuaz is the story of an alienation, but also one of his estrangement from his “own” people, whose hopes that he would lead them to a promised prosperity in “civilisation” he has disappointed. Beat Furrer recounts that in his book “Tristes Tropiques”, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote “a shattering sentence – that in 1930, he saw in the Amazon region what it could mean to be human, with all the implications of a free life. But when he returned there twenty years later, everything was over, everything had been destroyed. “Civilisation” brought imported illnesses, alcoholism and other addictions. Even the last corner of the world had been conquered by profit-seekers.”

Gallardo’s work is great world literature not only as a record of its time, but above all as a literary work of art: Eisejuaz is a novel of inner voices and linguistic sounds, a fascinating, image-rich interweaving of characters, times, situations – confusing, enigmatic and breathtaking, full of images from a magic world, where angels of lizards and other animals are real, and the wood can speak. Beat Furrer develops his musical structure out of the narrative style of multiple voices. In his opera, instrumental and vocal sounds combine almost completely: “The orchestra is the resonating space of the parts or blends with a web of voices in the tutti scenes: it sings, screams or whispers, as in the chorus of workers in the sawmill.”

The characters are narrated through their vocal style. “The main character Eisejuaz has the widest spectrum of vocal expression, from singing, more or less close to speaking, totally embedded in the orchestral sound, with quite arioso passages.” His adversary Paqui has above all a virtuoso role, “exalted, and recitative-like, with sudden changes of voice, from a crying to an aggressive tone. Always close to the language.” The whole opera is developed from a choral principle: the twelve-voice vocal ensemble is the starting point of the composition. “There are choral moments which are overlaid by the solo protagonists, but there are also very widely spaced polyphonic structures: whispering, calling, shouting, which are added by the orchestra – especially in the second act at the beginning where the polyphonic is suddenly contrasted with a dialogue. My plan was to always develop all the solo voices out of the choral, and thereby to create a balance.”

For Beat Furrer, opera is the “open art form” that needs to be taken forwards into the future. Its medium is the voice: “Without explanatory doublings the voice itself narrates, it is directly received by the listener. He makes the narrative his own. Whether I close my eyes or not, whether I am familiar with the libretto or not, it grips and animates me far beyond the discursive understanding. My body sings along within itself and enters into a relationship of resonance with the other. The sound of the voice first constitutes the character of the protagonist.” 

What does Beat Furrer mean when he demands that the music must create “the conditions where the attention is focussed on the voice, so that the voice itself narrates”? In each music theatre work he constantly develops this narrative style in new ways. “So as I search for possible forms of narrative, I indeed search for ‘melody’: a melody in the process of emerging, in the space between language and sound of the voice, integrated into an instrumental structure as its extension and metamorphosis. This results in expressivity and narrative beyond language.”

In a certain way, says Beat Furrer, his study of the subject matter of Eisejuaz has “altered my life” – an insight into the structures of colonialism, as in depictions such as those by Theodor Koch-Grünberg of what he saw and heard in Brazil’s primeval forests: “a culture which we have lost. We talk about travelling to Mars, but we are not able to co-exist on earth with others so that we do not destroy something in the process. The fact that people are slowly recognising this gives some cause for hope. But there continues to be this immense driving force which holds fast to the course of self-destruction. With philosophers such as Bruno Latour, who succeeded in “expressing the idea of something ‘other’, and of formulating it in a way which suggests an aesthetic stance: that we now live in a radically different world, which is suddenly visibly comprehensively threatened, and that despite that we continue to think of our relationship to nature as if nature could enable everything, as if it were something different from us which we can endlessly exploit.”

The character of Eisejuaz represents this tension-laden relationship: between an unbroken safe existence in a natural space and its destruction, and it tells of a utopia, of what could be.

Marie Luise Maintz
(trabslation: Elizabeth Robinson / from [t]akte 2/2024)