Musical moments about the novel “The Stranger” by Albert Camus

On Saturday 2 September at 12:30 pm, scholarship holder Elnaz Seyedi and Johannes Abel will present a project that was awarded the 5,000 Euro Chamber Music Prize by the Mannheim National Theatre in August 2021.

The audience prize in the composition competition went to the trio of Ehsan Khatibi (composition), Elnaz Seyedi (composition) and Johannes Abel (libretto). The task was to set a scene from the novel “The Stranger” by Albert Camus to music. Their piece of music deals with the end of the novel, with the court scene with flashbacks to the murder, interrogation and custody:

“It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.” (Albert Camus, “The Stranger”)

Illustration: Matthias Pelzer