Today, examining the legacy of Romanticism involves a complex process of exploration and reinterpretation; it means confronting a vast archive, a veritable grammar of emotions, ranging from all-consuming love to heart-wrenching separation, from feverish anticipation to the idealisation of the beloved. These concepts have shaped the Western imagination for over two centuries. Indeed, the risk inherent in this repertoire does not lie in a lack of beauty or value, but rather centres on an excess of monumentalisation; if reduced to mere tradition to be passively contemplated or to an untouchable concert-hall canon, that emotional reservoir risks appearing petrified, distant, incapable of speaking to the contradictions and lived realities of our present.
It is within this gap that the Romaeuropa Festival’s decision to present Die schöne Magelone (The Beautiful Magelone) at the Pelanda del Mattatoio – a theatrical reinterpretation of Johannes Brahms’ Op. 33 – finds its place. The project, presented by the German Academy in Rome, Villa Massimo, featuring the author Sabine Scho, the tenor Gideon Poppe, the pianist Anh Trung Sam and the hair artist Julian Aaron Astor Paschen, expresses the need to deconstruct the traditional architecture of listening. Whilst preserving the integrity of Brahms’s original cycle of fifteen Lieder, the performance is rhythmically interrupted and interspersed with moments of reading, visual projections and performative action. A hybrid format that moves the evening away from the reassuring composure of a chamber concert, reintroducing the archetype of love as a living, fragmented entity.
At the heart of Brahms’s score lies Ludwig Tieck’s reworking of the ancient medieval chivalric tale of the beautiful Magelone and Count Peter of Provence.
A tale of sudden escapes, lost rings, obstacles and forced separations, which Brahms chooses not to present as a linear dramatic plot, but rather to shatter into fifteen romances conceived as sudden dizzying surges of emotion, nuclei of pure sentimental tension. Interwoven with this nineteenth-century framework are contributions by Sabine Scho, comprising four readings drawn from her poetry cycle Leitfaden für Verliebte (Guide for Lovers), accompanied by the projection of a series of photographs taken in Rome.
This juxtaposition serves no didactic purpose; on the contrary, the still images—comprising urban vistas, everyday surfaces and material details—tear the myth away from its fairy-tale landscape to ground it in a tangible, present-day dimension. Scho’s poetic text creates a constant tension, revealing the disenchanted and contemporary fragility of falling in love, opening up pockets of lucidity within the pathos of nineteenth-century romance. Yet the performance’s breaking point – and indeed its most radical gesture – unfolds elsewhere, on a purely physical and corporeal level.
For almost the entire duration of the performance, the Berlin-based hair artist Julian Aaron Astor Paschen cuts Sabine Scho’s hair live, whilst the camera operated by Per Lang transmits real-time close-ups of the author’s face onto a large screen. The cutting is paused only when Scho stands up to read her own poems: in those moments, the author leaves her chair and exposes herself to the audience, making the gradual change in her hairstyle evident and visually marking the stages of her transformation. Rather than merely documenting the gesture, the video close-up transforms Scho’s features and micro-expressions into a silent emotional landscape, where her unmoving gaze and the gradual falling of her locks become theatrical elements, turning her face into a vivid mirror of the metamorphosis taking place.
In the original plot of the legend, the hair represents the minute detail upon which the protagonists’ fate hinges; it is precisely because of a hairstyle altered following her captivity that Pietro struggles to recognise the woman he loves, in a farcical and tragic twist that threatens to shatter the entire happy ending.
However, in the medieval source, this transformation remains a mere narrative incident – a disguise endured, an external accident serving only to complicate the male hero’s perception.
On stage, however, the artistic treatment radically overturns this perspective; that incidental detail is wrested from the literary plot to take on the significance of a declaration of autonomy. The haircut ceases to be a contingency to be endured and becomes a rite of passage enacted in the first person, a physical redefinition in which altering one’s appearance takes on the weight of a political gesture, a shedding of the skin that directly affects one’s identity.
What makes this choice truly revolutionary is not so much the act itself as its temporal persistence. The action does not culminate in a symbolic snip of the scissors for the sake of the performance, but claims to occupy the entire duration of the musical score, extending uninterrupted throughout the full ninety minutes. There is an evident radicalism in taking this time, a meticulous care with which Paschen accompanies the fall of every single strand of hair, imposing on the space a rhythm of its own – methodical and inexorable – which rejects the haste of the performance to become an exercise in real transformation. Precisely because of the centrality of this gesture, one almost feels a sense of regret at the lack of sensory layering: it would have been interesting to mic the scissors and make their metallic click audible, to lend a textural quality to the musical flow. That sharp, rhythmic snip could have acoustically marked the tempo of change, inserting itself as a concrete and living friction between the piano’s timbre and the vocal line.
This layered visual and performative architecture, on the other hand, rests upon a musical framework of absolute philological rigour. Brahms’s Op. 33 demands technical and emotional control, oscillating ceaselessly between chivalrous fervour and lyrical introspection. On stage, the tenor Gideon Poppe chooses to tackle this repertoire by fully embracing its nineteenth-century spirit, with a highly expressive vocal style and phrasing brimming with emotional intensity. A theatrical and impassioned interpretation, at times almost too emphatic, which stands in stark contrast to the conceptual restraint of the visual staging: a clear disparity between the emotional intensity of nineteenth-century singing and the impassive calm of the live action, causing two distinct temporalities to coexist within the same space.
The balance of the scene hinges on Anh Trung Sam’s piano, where the instrumental part is far from being a mere accompaniment. Through a touch attuned to the dynamic contrasts of Brahms’s composition, Sam builds the supporting structure upon which the voice and the slow pace of the staging engage in dialogue.
The staging is underpinned by a radical linguistic choice: both the lieder-style singing and Scho’s poetic prose are rendered in the original German. Whilst the presence of Italian surtitles attempts to provide an indispensable bridge for the audience in the theatre, the live experience is characterised by an almost unbearable density of perception. The spectator is, in fact, forced into a constant shifting of focus: following the translation on screen, allowing oneself to be enveloped by the sound of the original language and, at the same time, keeping one’s eyes fixed on the hypnotic detail of the editing and the urban projections means inhabiting a fragmented space that rejects any form of rapid or convenient consumption. This is a deliberate rupture, which distances the performance from any consolatory compromise. Removing Romanticism from its museum display case does not mean rendering it docile or tamed, but accepting that its memory continues to disorient, demonstrating that a canon only truly becomes contemporary again when it sheds its monumental certainties to interrogate the present through the slow, real and irreversible passage of time embodied by a changing body.
Die schöne Magelone, Romaeuropa Festival 2026, Mattatoio, Rome, 29.09.2026
Presented by the German Academy in Rome, Villa Massimo, featuring the author Sabine Scho, the tenor Gideon Poppe, the pianist Anh Trung Sam and the hair artist Julian Aaron Astor Paschen.
images: (cover 1) Die schöne Magelone (2-4) Die schöne Magelone, Romaeuropa Festival 2026, photo: Cosimo Trimboli
