About the work
The stage version of Elfriede Jelinek's eponymous novel (1983) was premiered in 2004 at the Schauspiel Stuttgart. The adaptation reworks the world-famous novel, which was filmed in 2001 by Michael Haneke with Isabelle Huppert. Jelinek adapts the material for the stage in her typical linguistic style: montages, repetitions, philosophical interpolations and quoted foreign language.
Plot
Erika Kohut, in her mid-30s, lives with her domineering mother in a Viennese apartment and works as a piano teacher at the conservatory. Behind the bourgeois façade she conceals sadomasochistic fantasies, voyeurism and a disturbed relationship to her own body. When the young student Walter Klemmer enters her class and falls in love with her, something breaks open in Erika. She tries to live out her most secret desires with him — with catastrophic consequences. Klemmer reacts with violence to the demands she has set down in writing; in the end Erika remains alone, injured and still trapped, unchanged.
Cultural significance
Die Klavierspielerin is among the most disturbing texts of contemporary German-language literature and treats female sexuality, maternal control and the speechlessness of desire with a depth scarcely reached before it. The stage version sharpens, through the direct presence of the body, what in the novel was bound to interior monologue. Haneke's 2001 film won the Grand Prix of the Cannes Film Festival and made the material world-famous. Erika Kohut ranks among the most complex female figures of German-language drama.