The Munich Biennale is worldwide the only festival that shows exclusively world premieres of new music theater works. In the past the festival has opened up a multitude of opportunities for young composers to test themselves and their artistic ambitions at the highest level.

When Dr. Hans-Georg Küppers, the director of the Department of Arts and Culture of the City of Munich, asked us whether we were interested in taking over starting in 2016 as the artistic directors of this special festival, we were not only surprised and extremely pleased about the wonderful prospects, we also immediately saw the confidence placed in us as a challenge to continue the extremely successful history over the last decades and to continue developing new contents and formal dimensions. Once again two composers were asked to take over as successors to the composers Hans-Werner Henze and Peter Ruzicka. This alone speaks its own language.

Music theater is to us more than just a genre-related, sensuous delight. The classic composition term has been expanded. And for very good, comprehensible reasons. Our phenomenological relationships, in particular concerning aesthetic and formal frameworks, are happening all at once, irrespective of the grave political changes. How do the arts react? Or even better: how they act! For what is invented, experimentally compacted, and attempted in a model experiment, bound seemingly only by the genuine and the beautiful, soon finds itself – frequently under other names and masks – in completely different social relationships, not the least in advertising, film, communication and media. But also there where news is conveyed and opinions are formed. To us this means opening up and protecting the art realm as a place for research. The expanded composition term encompasses very different formats. From new opera to scenic installation, from minimalized artistic interventions in municipal spaces to composed performance – just to name a few.

This spectrum forms a realm that our social »multilingualism«, the everyday media polyphony, artistically acuminates and reflects. For this reason new music theater has become an open field, which can illuminate social and even political questions under special conditions.

Especially at the beginning of our work it seems self-evident to us to choose a theme that examines and executes the multilingualism, the translation qualities, and the conjunction among the component languages of new music theater. »OmU – Original mit Untertiteln« (»original version with subtitles«) comes initially from a cinematic context, but it very quickly becomes clear that it could, for example, also be called »original version with supertitles«, like what occurs during most opera performances. And what does originality mean, what is a translation within music theater, within its templates, libretti, scores, performances, traditions, documentations, and stories of its reception … just to imply the thematic circle here.

From the beginning we had decided to make the Munich Biennale primarily a forum fornewcomers once again. The average age of the artists in 2016 lies in the range of 30 years. In order to open up new paths for the young artists, starting in 2013 we had already organized so-called international biennale platforms, at first in Munich but then also with international partners worldwide, for example in Bern; Rotterdam; Buenos Aires; Beijing; and in many more cities. Here selected young artists from different disciplines - in other words, not just composers, but also set designers, authors, directors, video artists, performers, etc. - encounter one another to contemplate certain themes and questions, get to know one another and each other's works, and in the end form work teams, which will pursue together their respective projects over the course of the following months and years. Team work is equally as important to us as the individual, artistic concentration at a worktable. Our first edition in 2016 is drawing a significant share of its projects from these platforms. What is decisive here is that the artistic subsections encounter one another and exchange with one another on an eye-to-eye basis, and are from the start open to productive debates.

The Munich Biennale 2016 is presenting itself in a temporally and spatially concentrated form. This means that in a very short period there will be more premieres and a distinctly higher concentration of performances, and all of this very close to Muffatwerk, our festival center. All of the performance venues can be reached easily on foot from here, whether it is Müller'sche Volksbad, the Gasteig Cultural Center, the art spaces at Lothringer13, or Einstein Kultur. Some of the happenings will take place in municipal spaces, for instance, a bus opera, a »homeopathic mob«, or an opera in a city quarter. In addition, within a sweeping fluid discussion the entire program of the festival will be prepared, conveyed, and reflected upon in a multitude of events by different cooperation partners. And also within the Biennale itself its theme will be pondered and discussed during a three-day symposium.

We hope and wish that the Munich Biennale will continue to be a unique international festival of new music theater and can fertilize und inspire in an intense form the practice and lively discussion of contemporary music theater, that as many people as possible can see the diversity and quality of the artistic offerings, and that in the long run the participating artists will also be sponsored, encouraged, and supported in their research activities.

Daniel Ott, Manos Tsangaris
November 2015