Kilter, Andromeda Anarchia, Growlers Choir, and SEVEN) SUNS‘ collaborative opera, La Suspendida have released a video for “Song of the Countess” that was filmed in Paris at the Châtelet sur le toit.
Librettist William Berger comments,
“In this segment, María Elena explains the source of her necrophiliac lover Tanzler’s obsession with her in life and in death. She retells his vision of a supposed ancestress, the Countess of Cosel, who told him she’d been sent by the Goddess of Love to promise him an ideal woman – not yet born, but to be created one day from his deepest fantasies. When he met María Elena, he instantly recognized her as the Countess’s promised Ideal. (The colorful life of the Countess, and Dr. Tanzler’s belief that she’d “visited” him with this strange promise, are both historically true). María Elena recounts this story to the Chorus of the Dead, explaining how Tanzler’s obsession with her beyond death is not perverse but divinely ordained. It is a discrete “number” in this largely through-composed score, and follows a Brechtian meter and rhyme form to frame it as a sort of oration to the judges of Eternity.”
