FAMA (2004-2005)
Aural theater in eight scenes
for large ensemble, eight-part (SSAATTBB) and actress
Texts: Arthur Schnitzler, Lucrez, Carlo Emilio Gadda

A young woman before a mirror "Am I really so beautiful? – Is that me there who speaks?" She experiences herself though the projections of the society around her, reflects in the image of others. Her nakedness shows her exposed, defenceless, an object of desire. An obsessive view from without: she has not yet found herself, remains a stranger to who she is. In Schnitzler's novel, Fräulein Else – which appears as the basic narrative layer in Beat Furrer’s FAMA - is sent out into the fine world of a glitzy Italian hotel in the Dolomites. Else has a hopeless, demure sense of the direction in which this society is leading her, a society whose women are kept on the end of leads attached to pearl collars. "When I marry, I will most probably do it cheaper" – marriage is another form of prostitution. Her mother's beseeching letters pressure her: Else must find money to support her debt-ridden father, first thirty and then fifty thousand guilders. The sponsor's price is high and leads Else to a world of self-destruction, a further "victim on the altar of a world of total reification" (Furrer).

A breathless monologue, blurted out in great distress: "I want to leave"… Existential danger is the starting situation of Beat Furrer's "Fama" – a volcanic explosion, as described by the Roman poet Lukrez – pure status quo, an overpowering pressure which can lead only to flight. "I hear the screaming, the fire, the breath…" a massive, glistening sound.

At the centre of the eight scenes Beat Furrer positions an utopia: A complimentary vision of a distant, serene garden, "with nothing but dreaming trees, united in one thought…" (Carlo Emilio Gadda). A sense of longing is brought to sound by the echo of a distant, pulsating sigh.
In the house of Fama resonate sounds of man and earth, distant mumblings and rumblings. Fama, the mythical figure, has built a house "entirely of sounding ore, resonating ubiquitously it hurls back in imitation what it hears", like Ovid described, "with overwhelming sensuality" (Beat Furrer). The indefatigable monologue of Else is a human's destiny, reverberating – as a scream, as a desolate whisper, as a breathless babble. This figure, whose thoughts are language, oscillates between the rapture of a dream and a harried existence. "How curious my voice sounds" – the voice and its alternating tonalities is increasingly approached as the piece progresses, from 'close-ups' to a unification with the instrumental sound and finally a complete loss of voice: "Fama reveals the ensuing catastrophe in an instrumental aftershock."

In Beat Furrers FAMA, first performed in Donaueschingen in 2005, the House of Ovid’s Fama was a theatrical and musical inspiration for a specially designed “aural room”, which led to a new perception of the inside and outside of sound.

Marie Luise Maintz