In search of an answer to the agonising question of why contemporary music has no audience and even strikes him as ugly, a young composer encounters the „father of the avant-garde“ during a journey through time: Anton Webern, who fled to an Alpine village in the final days of the war in 1945 to escape the bombing of Vienna. Over the course of six encounters, the master imparts knowledge about his art to his young colleague, yet these meetings increasingly descend into farce, albeit with a tragic outcome. 

Behind this satire, based on historical documents, lies the question of how millions of Germans and Austrians who were NOT persecuted lived under the Nazi regime, and it sheds light on how we today would behave in a state of injustice shaped by totalitarian ideology. The „banality of evil“ (Hannah Arendt) is accompanied by a banality of everyday life that establishes itself even under the most extreme living conditions. It embodies the timeless nature of societal indifference towards anything that stands in the way of one’s own comfort and security.

The spoken dialogue between the two men is set to music by a quartet of four women, a „no-string quartet“, in a composed interpretation of Anton Webern’s Bagatelles, Op. 9 – the shortest pieces in the history of music, which are stretched here to 80 minutes. A kind of „time-lupe“, allowing us to perceive Webern’s sonic miniatures in a different light.

Webern was already dead by the time the new generation of avant-garde composers dedicated themselves to Webern’s „New Music“, whilst at the same time imbuing it with elements of an authoritarian ideology. A century later, both the mystery surrounding this musical style and society’s alienation from it remain. 

In addition to the festival dates, there will be further performances of *SMOKING KILLS* on 19, 20 and 21 November at 7.30 pm at the Theater Nestroyhof Hamakom.