In Adriana H�lszky's opera "Bremer Freiheit", Geesche leads her fellows with cheerful nonchalance to their doom. The murders follow in regular succession, with no more...

In Adriana H�lszky's opera "Bremer Freiheit", Geesche leads her fellows with cheerful nonchalance to their doom. The murders follow in regular succession, with no more passion or sentimentality than "Ten Little Indians". What H�lszky wanted to create was anything but a neo-veristic shocker, a psychoanalytic character study or the melodrama of a victimized woman. Instead, she has given us an almost playful alienation, a sort of Grand Guignol operetta. Connoisseurs of Fassbinder's plays know that they are generally neither realistic nor "naturalistic" but instead find their raison d'�tre in stylization, albeit not on the sublime classical sense. Only on the surface do they seem to deal with real human beings of flesh and blood. In reality they deal with character masks, like the generalized figures of comedy. In "Bremer Freiheit", then, all the characters apart from Geesche are "marionettes of suppression". It is precisely because of these admittedly horrifying goings-on that H�lszky has succeeded in giving all her characters and stage actions a lite-rally "tactile" plasticity. Yet at the same time she has remained playful, pre-serving Fassbinder's rondo structure, for example, and introducing a number of buffo elements. (from the liner notes by Gerhard R. Koch)