Der Andere

Eggert, Moritz; Lovecraft, Howard Philips (1890-1937)

Not a melodrama in the usual sense, but a so-called ‘mobile melodrama’ for singers and ensemble based on the story ‘The Outsider’ by Howard Philips Lovecraft, Moritz Eggert created his piece ‘The Other’. Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is considered the most important successor to the great fantastic narrative tradition of Edgar Allan Poe. On the surface, his stories are real horror stories, but like Poe, there is usually a second layer of statements that often shows a deeply pessimistic attitude towards people. In Lovecraft's stories of the so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, all of humanity is nothing more than a plaything of oversized and all-powerful alien beings, says Eggert.
The short story “The Outsider” is also an encrypted self-portrait of the author Lovecraft. The first-person narrator is alone in a huge castle that is ‘infinitely old and terribly dark’. ‘Beings must have looked after me, but I can't remember anyone but myself... I don't remember ever hearing a human voice in all these years, not even my own... I often lay outside the putrid moat oand longingly imagined being one of those lucky people who had to live in the sunny expanses behind the endless forests." (from "The Outsider")
In a situation as confusing as the present, explains Moritz Eggert (although he sees the confusion in itself as something positive, as it holds enormous creative potential) it seemed more appealing to him to conjure up a dead genre like melodrama, not entirely without - intended - irony. Because the “other” from Lovecraft’s story also discovers at the end of his journey that he basically hasn’t moved. His journey into the light ends with the discovery of his own darkness.
Eggert was inspired to write this piece by a concert at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, for which a first version of this piece for piano and singer was created, which was written specifically for Salome Kammer. (Helmut Peters)