Contemporary Music Review, 2019

Vol. 38, Nos. 1–2, 180–192, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2019.1578128

On the Aesthetics and Working Process

of Elena Mendoza’s Music Theatre
Matthias Rebstock

In this paper, I will address basic aesthetic assumptions of the music theatre of Berlin-based
Spanish composer Elena Mendoza and will outline the strategies of her working process in
which she combines traditional score writing with a collaborative approach known from
contemporary theatre or dance. I will discuss these issues referring to her two major
music theatre pieces: Niebla after the novel by Miguel de Unamuno (premièred in
Dresden in 2007), and La Ciudad de las Mentiras based on four short stories by Juan
Carlos Onetti premièred at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2017. As co-author of these
two pieces, I give insight into our collaboration and decision-making process. In so
doing I write within the methodological framework of autoethnography and participant
observation.

Keywords: Elena Mendoza (1973–); Contemporary Music Theatre; Contemporary Opera;

Collaboration; Creative Process; Authorship; Performance

There are many different ways for composers to address the question of what it means
to write for music theatre or opera today. In her music theatre pieces, Elena Mendoza
follows some clear and fundamental aesthetic beliefs that also have become the basis
for our close collaboration. In this paper, I will outline these principles and explain
their effects. I will focus on the music theatre work Niebla from 2007, based on
Miguel de Unamuno’s eponymous novel, and I will finish with some remarks on La
Ciudad de las Mentiras, which was premièred in February 2017 at the Teatro Real in
Madrid using a quartet of short stories by Juan Carlos Onetti as its basis.
The perspective from which I am writing this paper is not an objective one. As co-
author of both music-theatre works, I have been involved in all conceptual questions
and decision-making processes. Writing about my own experience, but from the point
of view of a researcher, brings this paper close to the methodological framework of
autoethnography as it was developed to refine qualitative research methods (Ellis

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

 Contemporary Music Review 181
2004; Holman Jones 2005). Also, my focus on the creative and—to a certain extent—
collective process that Elena Mendoza seeks to facilitate through her special working
process justifies my choice of participant observation as a methodological approach
(Sawyer 2003; Fitch and Heyde 2007; Bickerstaff 2008). The subjective point of view
of this paper will therefore, one hopes, increase awareness and understanding of
Elena Mendoza’s music theatre.
First and foremost, working in the field of music-theatre means, for Elena Mendoza,
a constant search for specific forms that make it convincing and even necessary to
tackle a certain subject with the means of music-theatre, by which I mean finding
an answer to the question of why it should be done as music-theatre—and not as a
theatre piece or a concert piece. The question is not about simply setting a libretto
to music, but rather about finding a genuine form in which the different elements
involved in music-theatre actually interact and depend on each other, and at the
same time maintain their independence. What comes as a paradox at first sight is,
in fact, a constant challenge and even the driving force for Elena Mendoza in dedicat-
ing herself to the genre of music-theatre. How to have it both ways: that none of the
elements merely serves one of the others, or especially that music does not only serve
the text or underpin the story; that the acting on stage does not only ‘tell’ what music
and text already ‘say’ and so on; but rather that, as in polyphonic music, each element
or each voice stays independent and contributes to a whole that is more than the sum
of its parts or voices, that is to say a whole that does not only consist of parallel inde-
pendent lines but that can only exist in terms of this carefully-composed interaction of
its independent elements.
Elena Mendoza is obviously not alone in pursuing such a personal approach to
music-theatre. In fact, it is quite typical for those composers and dramaturges follow-
ing the lines that David Roesner and I have summed up with the term ‘Composed
Theatre’ (Roesner 2012; Rebstock 2012a). And of the many composers in this field,
it is Georges Aperghis to whom Elena Mendoza feels particularly close in this regard
(Rebstock 2012b). But what is special and rather unique is the set of conclusions
that Elena Mendoza draws for her own working process, as I will outline later.
The challenge gets even bigger when one realises that Elena Mendoza is dedicated to
telling stories with her music-theatre pieces; that is she is looking for new forms of real
musical–theatrical narration. Taking into account what I have just written about inter-
play and the non-hierarchy of different theatrical elements, her approach means, first
of all, an intermedia concept of narration, not a text-driven one. Furthermore, what is
at stake is neither a traditional idea of mimicry or illusion and a straightforward story-
telling based on psychological roleplay and traditional notions of embodiment nor an
epic approach to theatre in the Brechtian sense. Rather, it is about an idea of narration
that Tecklenburg (2014) describes as one that is based on the experience of a postdra-
matic and performative theatre practice, but one that returns to narration by placing its
emphasis on the performativity of telling a story and the process of narration.
With her second basic conviction, Elena Mendoza is also in line with many other
composers in the field of Composed Theatre: from an ontological point of view, the
182 M. Rebstock
score of a music-theatre piece represents just one of its elements—not the work itself.
Music-theatre only exists in the moment of its performance, in which all the theatrical
elements come together in the presence of an audience. The compositional process,
therefore, does not stop when the score is finished; rather, it continues until the
moment of performance, and the staging of the piece is to be considered right from
the outset, instead of being understood as merely a subsequent interpretation of the
score. What we usually find in an operatic composition is a more or less clearcut
step-by-step production process: there is a writer who writes a libretto, a composer
who writes a score, and a theatre director who does the staging. Or, with the rise of
literary opera since the beginning of the twentieth century, in many cases the composer
adapts an existing text to his or her needs without a librettist. But even here the respon-
sibilities for composition and staging are clearly separated. Elena Mendoza neglects
these traditional models, again in line with many other composers in the field of con-
temporary music-theatre. But what we usually find instead are composers who take the
whole process in their own hands, unifying the different steps of production into one
mammoth process and one responsibility. The list of composers who understand the
theatrical part (the staging) as part of their compositional process is long and starts
with the fathers of the so-called new music-theatre in the 1960s: Mauricio Kagel,
John Cage, Dieter Schnebel, Vinko Globokar, etc. And today the most prominent
names would be Georges Aperghis, Heiner Goebbels, Manos Tsangaris, Simon
Steen-Andersen, or Michel van der Aa (Sandner 2002; Hiekel 2012; Krogh Groth
2016).
Elena Mendoza took a different way. When the European Center for the Arts in
Dresden-Hellerau commissioned a music theatre piece from her in 2005 she started
to look for a theatre director to begin a collaborative working process. While
working on Niebla we also had to develop and define how this collaborative practice
would work and what it meant to us.
One of the crucial points of this collaborative approach is that we intended to create
a process in which we and the other teammates should constantly be in touch and be
able to react to the proposals of the others. This approach, of course, also means that
each one has to be open to step back and negotiate one’s own ideas and find common
solutions. To this end, we had regular meetings during the process, and each new part
was discussed between ourselves looking at the whole from both the musical and the
theatrical side. We decided in the end to make this close form of collaboration more
manifest by sharing the authorship of our pieces, including all legal and financial
implications.
Another important feature of our working process was that we wanted to combine
two different, and even opposing, approaches: the classical process of writing a score,
with its enormous potential for accuracy and complexity alike, and a working process
that is more commonly to be found in spoken or danced theatre, based on improvisa-
tion and devised as a collaborative process nourished by the different personalities and
individual competencies of the actors and musicians with whom we would work.
Doing so meant that, before the first note was written, we built the ensemble of
 Contemporary Music Review 183
1
musicians, singers and main actor we had in mind. Furthermore, we organised three
workshops during the compositional process in which we worked with the musicians,
singers and actor, allowing us to try out certain ideas and materials, and to improvise
new material which Elena Mendoza would then go on working with and which we
could try out in the next workshop.
But working for the moment of performance did not only imply working for an
ensemble we knew, but also meant that we involved the set and costume designers
at a very early stage so that we could know what kind of stage or set we would have,
and to react to the musical and theatrical implications of it. Working on the stage
design was therefore not, as is typically the case, part of the theatrical interpretation
of a finished musical composition but rather was a precondition of developing the
music, and took place as part of the conceptual considerations at the beginning of
the compositional process.

Niebla: Composing the Working Process

In 1914, Miguel de Unamuno, a member of the ‘Generación del 98’ and one of the
most important Spanish writers and philosophers of his day, published his novel
Niebla. In a tragic and simultaneously witty way, he tells the story of Augusto Pérez,
who is never sure about his existence, and who, to find out more about it, engages
himself in a kind of love experiment to discover if he is really alive. He fails and
longs to commit suicide. But when meeting the author of the novel, Unamuno
himself, he is told that he is just a character in a novel: his intuition that he was not
fully alive was correct. In a final showdown between Augusto and Unamuno, they
get into an argument about who is more real, the author of a novel or its characters,
reality or fiction, culminating in Augusto’s claim that he, a fictional person, is immor-
tal and therefore more real than Unamuno.
Unamuno uses the fog (Spanish: niebla) as a central metaphor to describe Augusto’s
doubts concerning his own existence. One of the first questions for us, working on a
piece of music-theatre using Unamuno’s text, was how to handle this central meta-
phor. We were looking for something that would be at the heart of the musical and
theatrical structure, in order to link the content with the formal level. We ultimately
decided that the (musical) principle of permutation would serve as a good basis and
central principle. First, Elena Mendoza worked intensively with various principles of
pre-Baroque polyphonic music, such as isorhythmic structures, in her music at that
time. Permutation was thus taken from her own compositional practices. Second, it
can also be used as a theatrical principle. Third, it can be used as a means of articulating
the existential doubts of Augusto: we defined five very different types of scenes taken
from the novel that would reappear throughout the piece in ever-changing variations
and orders. At first sight, they seem to be the same, but they lead up to a different point
of continuation, or the characters are different, or one sees ‘the same’ but from a differ-
ent spatial perspective. The perception of the audience gets constantly irritated and
upturned. Though working with a reduced amount of material, we could constantly
184 M. Rebstock
create new situations by combining it differently, just as in isorythmic music. And
under this fragmented surface of perception, the story of Augusto Pérez slowly
evolves, and the audience is left to put it together like a puzzle. Thereby, the main
metaphor of the novel turns into the general structural principle of music and
staging alike and drives the narrative forward.
There were also consequences for the construction of the space and the stage design,
as it would need to offer possibilities for the permutation of perception. The perform-
ance space in Hellerau is an open space without a fixed stage or audience area, which
gave us the chance to define the whole spacing according to our ideas. Together with
Moritz Nitsche, we developed a space in which the audience was separated into two
blocks facing each other. In the middle there was a central performance space, but
also at the back and at the sides were platforms and gangways such that both blocks
of the audience could be surrounded and embedded in the musical and theatrical
action. Everything happening in this space would look and sound differently according
to the position of each spectator. And as the two blocks were facing each other, one was
aware of the other spectators looking at things from a different perspective.
The central performance space was like an empty sheet of paper that has a crease
from one corner to the opposite one. The resulting two triangles were tilted towards
each audience group, and the summit of the stage was higher than the sightlines of
the audiences, such that it was not possible to see the ground of the performance
space on the opposite side. The sense of distance of the performers walking on the
opposite side was therefore upended. And characters could all of a sudden appear
without the audience knowing from where they had popped up.
A second fundamental decision we took, right at the beginning, was that we did not
want the traditional separation between musicians offstage and performers onstage.
Rather we wanted to work with musicians who would also have a theatrical part to
play. And we reached this decision because of the narrative potential it provides: every-
one surrounding Augusto would be musicians (instrumentalists and singers), meaning
that they all would share one level of ‘reality’ that Augusto would lack. He would be the
only one who speaks in a normal way. Everybody else would sing or speak in a highly
musicalised way: the basic feeling of Augusto not being connected to reality in the same
way as all the other people around him was reflected in the make-up of the cast.
Furthermore, for each of the five types of scenes, we defined a different constellation
of how music, theatrical action, text, and spacing would relate to another, and for all of
them, the role of the first tryouts was different. In Unamuno’s novel, for example,
Augusto likes to go out and to wander through the streets in order to dissolve
himself and be part of the anonymous mass of people (see Figure 1). These street
scenes became one of the five types of scenes and the basic idea for them was a
large movement of all musicians in the space. The timing of the music depended on
the movements of the musicians, the tempo of their walking, and their spatial dis-
tances. Elena Mendoza, therefore, chose an open form of notation, defining boxes
with sound material that could be combined freely by the musicians according to
certain rules. The musical refinement (number of boxes used, the tempo of changing
 Contemporary Music Review 185

Figure 1 Niebla, Street Scene No. 3. © Sabine Hilscher.

from one box to another, the density of differing sounds, etc.) happened in one of the
workshops, and as part of the final rehearsals onstage.
For another type of scene, which we called the Rosario scenes (see Figure 2), we used
a different model that would link music and theatrical action, and at the same time
would convey a semantic aspect of Unamuno’s story. Here, there is a young
woman, Rosario, working in the house of the rather rich and bourgeois Augusto
Pérez. When Eugenia, the woman with whom Augusto decided to fall in love, lets
him down, he starts to flirt with Rosario, giving her hope of an erotic relationship
—only for him to reject her soon thereafter. For us, the basic idea for this type of
scene was what we called the hamster-wheel of love; the constant movement of attrac-
tion and repulsion, leading to the new attraction, and so on. We reduced the many
different scenes between the two in the novel to a set of very few lines of text that
were constantly repeated and could be connected in different ways using certain utter-
ances as ‘joints’ so one could get from one textual loop to another. And in the same
manner, we developed musical loops and joints, and later also theatrical ones. These
different modules were not originally synchronised, meaning that the shift to a new
module would happen at different moments in the text and music. In the tryouts
with the three musicians, Anke Nevermann, Tobias Dutschke and Georg Wettin,
the soprano Katia Guedes playing Rosario and Oliver Nitsche playing Augusto, we
experimented with the possible combinations of the precomposed materials, and
finally, Elena Mendoza fixed a certain constellation in the score and the theatrical
modules were worked out.
186 M. Rebstock

Figure 2 Katia Guedes and Anke Nievermann in One of the Rosario Scenes. © Sabine
Hilscher.

The process for the Víctor scenes (see Figure 3), by contrast, started with improvisa-
tion and was only fixed during the process of rehearsals—not in the score, which only
provides the raw materials. Víctor is the only friend of Augusto. They meet regularly
for a game of chess and to discuss Augusto’s affairs. But Víctor somehow always knows
more about what Augusto is going to do. In our version, we refined him as kind of
embodiment of the author himself. To start off, we only set the situation: the two
men sitting at a table next to the central stage, and playing a board game with different
percussion instruments. It was a setting that allowed development into both the
 Contemporary Music Review 187

Figure 3 Oliver Nitsche as Augusto and Tobias Dutschke as Víctor in One of the Víctor
Scenes. © Sabine Hilscher.

musical and the theatrical dimensions. Tobias Dutschke (as Víctor) and Oliver Nitsche
then started to improvise, at first only musically, then adding parts of the text that we
had prepared. On the basis of these improvisations, Elena Mendoza then wrote rhyth-
mic patterns that once more made use of isorhythmic structures. Together with a new
version of the text, we returned to another set of tryouts and improvised with the new
patterns, looking for ways to integrate the texts in the rhythmic structure and build the
scenes.

La Ciudad de las Mentiras: Enhancing Polyphony

For our follow-up production, La Ciudad de las Mentiras (The City of Lies), which was
already commissioned by Gerard Mortier in 2010 but was postponed until 2017 for
several reasons including his premature death, we basically held on to our approach
and the working methods developed for Niebla while trying to refine them. One chal-
lenge was to integrate and establish our way of working, developed in the context of an
independent theatre, in the system of a large opera house like the Teatro Real in
Madrid. In addition, Elena Mendoza had to find ways of extending her writing from
a chamber-music approach in Niebla to writing for a big space that can house up to
2000 people. And we had to deal with a traditional proscenium stage, in which the
relation between audience and space is already fixed and (usually) cannot be
adapted to conceptual considerations.
188 M. Rebstock
But, apart from this new framework, we also wanted to examine a different way of
musical-theatrical narration. While in Niebla we split the linear plot of Unamuno into
five types of scenes and played with their permutation, for La Ciudad de las Mentiras we
wanted to explore the idea of working with different narrative threads and organising
them in a polyphonic way, in the field of both music and theatre. Instead of the vertical
cuts between the scenes in Niebla, Elena Mendoza wanted to work with polyphonic
layers and textures, and we wanted to experiment with several scenes happening on
stage simultaneously. We chose four short stories of Juan Carlos Onetti: Un sueño rea-
lizado, La novia robada, El Album, and El infierno tan temido. The writing of Onetti was
of great interest for us for two reasons. Being one of the initiators of what later devel-
oped into the so-called magical realism in Latin American literature, he is a master of
the most detailed observations and fictions, but, on the other hand, there is something
opaque about the motivation of his characters: the most important thing, very often, is
precisely that which is not said. So there is a void, a mysteriousness that leaves spaces
for the music to come in. The second point that fascinated us was that most of his
novels take place in the same imaginary town, Santa Maria, which originally is an
invention of Juan María Brausen, the central character of Onetti’s novel La vida
breve from 1950. Throughout his novels and short stories, the same locations in
Santa Maria and the same main characters reappear again and again, slowly unfolding
it into a huge, fictional cosmos. For our piece, this allowed us to unify the four different
narrative threads in one central space on stage,2 and to switch easily from one story to
the others. But Onetti’s Santa Maria is more than a place where things happen. It is
rather a protagonist on its own: in all four short stories, there is a woman as the

Figure 4 One of the ‘Tratsch-Szenen’: The Men of Santa Maria Gossiping. © Javier del Real.
 Contemporary Music Review 189

Figure 5 Anna Spina as Moncha and Graham Valentine as Diaz Grey in One of the Scenes
of La Novia Robada. © Javier del Real.

main character who struggles for a life in dignity, and who has to defend herself against
Santa Maria and its dull and narrow-minded male inhabitants and their constant gos-
siping. Each of the women builds up and sticks to an existential lie that allows her to
escape from the banal and degrading reality of Santa Maria. So La Ciudad de las Men-
tiras takes up Onetti’s central theme, that life is an existential lie: to live means—
according to him—to build up a lie that, alone, can turn our lives into something
that is worth being lived.
When we started to draft our piece, we took up this core constellation of the Onetti-
cosmos and turned it into the basic structure of the composition: there are four female
190 M. Rebstock
soloists and a collective of male performers on stage.3 Each story has a specific and
characteristic sound-world, such that, by listening to the music alone, the audience
can immediately grasp which story is currently being told. And for each story, there
is one big tutti-scene that we called ‘Tratsch-Szene’ (‘gossip-scene’) and an ‘Aria’
that would create a space for the female soloists, contrasting it to the ‘Tratsch-
Szenen’ (see Figures 4 and 5). In order to enhance the idea that Santa Maria is
more than a symbolic place of narration, we tried to overcome the gap between
stage and auditorium in the theatre and to create an aural space that would physically
include the audience: Elena Mendoza decided to place an ‘outside-orchestra’ in the
royal box at the central balcony, and composed her music in such a way that it
reached out into space and immersed the audience in the musical movements and
relations between the stage, the orchestra pit and the outside-orchestra.
In comparison to Niebla, we basically followed the same working-process, but we
adapted it to the new circumstances. For this, we could take advantage of the fact
that the Teatro Real—like all opera houses in Spain—is used to working only with
guest soloists and not with its own ensemble. So, we worked with the Orquesta
Titular del Teatro Real,4 but in addition with 15 soloists on stage:5 4 singers, 2
actors and 9 instrumentalists that also act and speak. With most of them, we had
been working before in different contexts, and all of them were chosen particularly
for this project.
Finally, we could convince Gerard Mortier of the importance of the workshops for
the compositional process of Elena Mendoza, and he helped us to arrange two work-
shops far ahead of the normal rehearsal period. They took place in 2011 and 2012, so
more than two years before the originally scheduled premiere. In comparison to
Niebla, they were placed earlier within the working process and the musical and thea-
trical material was more open, leaving even more space for improvisation and the crea-
tivity of the performers.

Conclusion
When Elena Mendoza and I started to set up our close working relation in 2005, such a
form of co-authorship was more or less unique within the field of opera or music-
theatre. But over the last years, this has changed. Nowadays, and especially in the
field of independent music-theatre, there are numerous teams and groups working
closely together, and some of the big festivals and promoters of contemporary
music theatre, such as the Münchner Biennale für zeitgenössisches Musiktheater or
the Fonds experimentelles Musiktheater in Germany have strongly supported these
collaborative working processes. A lot of interesting new and experimental pieces
have originated in this area ever since. However, there seems to be a tendency that
the role of musical composition loses its weight within these collaborative working
processes. Against this background, Elena Mendoza represents a clear position that
we were following in Niebla, La Ciudad de las Mentiras and that we will follow in
our new piece Der Fall Babel (The Babel Case) that we will premiere in the festival
 Contemporary Music Review 191
Schwetzinger SWR Festpiele in April 2019: within her own aesthetics, the music has to
be part of the syntax of the piece, and forms an integral part of the narrative process. If
this is not the case, Elena Mendoza is convinced, we rather encounter forms of theatre
with music or musicalised theatre than music-theatre in an emphatic sense. For her,
this is the real challenge of composing music-theatre.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor
Matthias Rebstock is a professor of stage music at the University of Hildesheim (Germany) and the
author and editor of numerous books and articles in the field of contemporary music theatre and its
aesthetics. He also works as director in this field. He is a specialist in first performances of new music
theatre and operas, and on devising performances in the interdisciplinary field between theatre,
music, and electronic media. His works have been shown at many venues and festivals throughout
Europe.

Notes
[1] Cast: Titus Engel, conductor; Moritz Nitsche, set design; Sabine Hilscher, costume design;
Oliver Nitsche, actor; Katia Guedes, soprano; Uta Buchheister, mezzo-soprano; Guillermo
Anzorena, baritone; Anke Nevermann, oboe; Georg Wettin, clarinet; Steve Altoft, trumpet;
Matthias Jann, trombone; Andreas Roth, euphonium Moritz; Susanne Zapf, violin; Matthias
Lorenz, cello; John Eckhardt, double bass; Heather O’Donell, piano; Tobias Dutschke,
percussion.
[2] Stage design: Bettina Meyer, costume design: Sabine Hilscher.
[3] Cast: Katia Guedes, soprano; Laia Falcón, mezzo-soprano; Michael Pflumm, tenor; Guillermo
Anzorena, bariton; Graham Valentine and David Luque, actors; Anne Landa, accordion; Anna
Spina, viola; Tobias Dutschke, percussion; Íñigo Giner Miranda, piano; Miguel Pérez Iñesta,
clarinet; Martin Posegga, saxophone; Matthias Jann, trombone; Wojciech Garbowski, violin
and Erik Borgir, cello; SWR Experimantalstudio, sound; Urs Schönebaum, lights.
[4] Musical director: Titus Engel.
[5] This would have been almost impossible for one of the opera houses in the German speaking
countries with their ensemble culture.

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