© Ingo Pertramer
“The cornet was the unexpected gift of a single autumn night, written in one go by the light of two candles fluttering in the night wind; the drifting of the clouds across the moon caused it…”
Supported with musical virtuosity by violinist Nikolai Tunkowitsch, Nicholas Ofczarek and Tamara Metelka transported the audience into a witty, profound, poetic, and at times grotesque exchange—exactly the kind one would expect from Kafka.
Rainer Maria Rilke:
The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke.
An evening for three voices
Written in 1899, Rilke describes the final days of the 18-year-old Christoph Rilke von Langenau, who fell on the banks of the Raab at the Battle of Mogersdorf.
Tamara Metelka and Nicholas Ofczarek oscillate in Rilke’s text—one of the author’s most successful publications—between the passionate intensity of a hopeful young life and the senseless carnage of war. Nikolai Tunkowitsch creates moments of maximum intensity and expressive fervor in between.
When Nicholas Ofczarek and Tamara Metelka bring Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic ballad ‘The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke’ to the stage, the result is an evening of luminous language and profound stillness.
Rilke’s early prose poem is a hymn to life and transience, to longing, passion, and the brief blaze of a young heart in the face of death. Ofczarek and Metelka transform Rilke’s words into a dialogue—tender, glowing, carrying the kind of melancholy that turns pain into beauty.
The violin embraces the narrative: sometimes like a distant echo, sometimes like a breath between sentences—music as the soul of this poetic dance.
An evening about love, courage, and the gentle tragedy of the moment.
A chamber experience of language and sound—sensitive, vivid, timeless.
Experience Rilke anew with three artists who translate word, feeling, and music into motion.
