About the work
"Ändere die Welt!" ("Change the World!") is a music-theatre work by director Mart van Berckel and pianist and musical director Pedro Beriso. It was premiered in March 2023 at Dutch National Opera's Opera Forward Festival in Amsterdam, as a co-production of Dutch National Opera, Dutch National Touring Opera (Enschede) and Opera Zuid (Maastricht) with the Dutch National Opera Studio. The title quotes Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler ("Change the world, it needs it"). Beriso is responsible for arrangement and piano; the score collages music by Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Schumann, Auber, Beethoven and Wagner with spoken word and electronic soundscapes.
Plot
The piece is set on the day after a revolution. In a room full of empty chairs – the remnants of barricades – four singers meet in the wake of devastating events to pause, to mourn, to hope and to imagine a way into the future. They are joined by spoken-word artist Amara van der Elst as a figure who stands simultaneously inside and outside the action – a narrator or presenter who can, as it were, "play", "pause", rewind or fast-forward events. The evening thus interweaves political utopia and disillusion, collective hope and individual lostness into a reflection on the possibility of change.
Cultural significance
The trade journal Theaterkrant named "Ändere die Welt!" the best new composition of the 2022/23 season. This multilingual music theatre stands in the tradition of the politically engaged theatre of Brecht and Eisler, interrogating the possibility of social change through the means of musical collage. After the Amsterdam premiere the work was also shown in the German-speaking world, including at the Semperoper Dresden (Semper Zwei), establishing van Berckel and Beriso as voices of a discursive, present-focused music theatre.