Uma Vaca Flatterzunge

Uma Vaca Flatterzunge (A Cow Flatterzunge) presents itself as a para-operatic organism in a constant state of critical instability, where the tradition of opera is simultaneously invoked, distorted, and dismantled. The composer adopts a deliberately satirical stance toward the conventions of lyric theater, drawing on historical archetypes—from opera buffa to comic opera, from operetta to light musical theater—not to revive them, but to subject them to a process of conceptual and formal erosion.

The dramaturgy is built on the fragmentation of vocal discourse, the intentional trivialization of dialogue, and the dissolution of classical recitative, creating a hybrid space between the sung and the spoken. Linear narrative gives way to a discontinuous flow of sonic situations, gestures, and signs. Within this framework, instrumental music assumes a central structural role, emerging as the true driving force of the work’s dramaturgy in a distinctly postmodern and self-reflective gesture.

This sonic universe is embodied by a group of internationally renowned performers whose presence is not merely interpretive, but integral to the work’s conceptual core. The saxophones of Daniel Kientzy interact with the tuba and trombone of Giancarlo Schiaffini. The piano of John Tilbury introduces a dimension of expanded listening and suspended time. The Arabesco Quartet contributes finely detailed chamber writing, functioning as connective tissue between instrumental gesture and stage action.

The vocal dimension, far removed from traditional psychological characterization, emerges as a field of friction between voice, body, and language. The performers—Ana Ferreira, Hélder Bento, Marco Alves dos Santos, and Margarida Marecos—create archetypal, stripped-down, and ironic figures within a schizoid and allegorical landscape. These are socio-musical characters inhabiting a satirical, corrupt, and surreal world in which common sense is revealed in its fragility and the absurd becomes a critical method.

The stage space is dominated by a singular sculpture by Rui Chafes—a rock-vagina suspended above the proscenium, an uncanny, almost alien presence that concentrates and radiates symbolic tensions between matter, desire, and transcendence. The physical language developed by Ana Borralho and João Galante interacts with lyrical and abstract video environments by Paulo Abreu, while the surreal costumes and jewelry by Ilsa D’Orzac heighten the burlesque and ghostly atmosphere of the staging.

Uma Vaca Flatterzunge ultimately positions itself as an expanded field between contemporary music, theater of the absurd, and performance art—a grotesque yet lucid theater in which composers, performers, and critics/musicologists seem to coexist within the same fictional plane. The work radiates vitality and irony, interrogating from within the very idea of opera today.