Georg Friedrich Haas / Klangforum Wien

It is all getting a bit too much for the young heiress Nadja, so she decides it´s time to sell her parents´ house. As the real estate agent puts it, »We are way down south in the province of Lower Austria«, a prime location. But the potential buyers are soon confronted with the unimaginable dark depths of a terrible past – the house for sale is a »Bluthaus«, a house with a blood stained history. In a nightmarish chamber opera, Austrian author, dramatist and librettist Händl Klaus has reconstructed a story of child abuse in the midst of a seemingly idyllic family. Composer Georg Friedrich Haas illustrates the horrendous emotional consequences of this abuse using a radical musical language: glimmering sound-threads of undetermined intervals pull the listener into a tale of darkness. »Bluthaus« is a work of extremes, an ambiguous and highly topical piece of musical theatre, presented in Hamburg with Peter Nussbach’s new scenic version of the Wiener Festwochen 2014. Georg Friedrich Haas, the Elbphilharmonie’s current composer in residence has written 45 minutes of brand new music for this production. The cast will be the same as in the celebrated production from the Schwetzingen Festival 2011 about which the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper commented: »No praise is high enough« and that the opera left the audience in a state of »distraught, yet emphatic approval«.