About the work
“Die wunderbaren Jahre” (The Wonderful Years) is a chamber opera by the Dresden-born composer Torsten Rasch, based on Reiner Kunze's 1976 prose collection of the same name. The music-theatre piece is written for soprano, mezzo-soprano, bass, a speaking voice and a chamber ensemble of string quintet, flute, clarinet, bassoon and accordion, and is performed without an interval. Commissioned by Theater Regensburg, it premiered there in February 2025, directed by Sabine Sterken and conducted by John Spencer.
Plot
There is no continuous plot: in 21 scenes Rasch takes up sketches from Kunze's book, which grew out of conversations with children, apprentices and soldiers and tells of growing up in East Germany. It is about children drawn into military education at an early age, about a school system and a state that demand conformity and punish independence, and about young people caught between rebellion, disillusionment and dreams. The three singers switch between roles, the speaking voice delivers Kunze's texts, and from the sixth scene onwards distorted folk songs run through the piece as interludes.
Cultural significance
Kunze's book was published in the West by S. Fischer in 1976; banned in East Germany, it circulated there in clandestine copies and led to his expulsion from the Writers' Union and, in 1977, to his emigration to West Germany. Rasch sets the idealised images of home in East German songs against the reality the texts describe. Kunze himself attended one of the first performances in Regensburg.