♫ Requiems for the party girl
© CRI CD 817

Patria 2: Requiems for the party girl for solo mezzo-soprano, actors, small chorus and orchestra, taped electronic sounds. Duration: 80'. Instead of the noble Minoan princess her name suggests, Ariadne, the Party Girl, is a gay-tragic harlequinesque creature whose life is shattered as if by a drug overdose. She is the prisoner of her own mind. We find her in an asylum surrounded by lunatics who speak absurd languages. Even the doctors and nurses who visit her speak foreign languages. She alone speaks the language of the audience and thus gains their sympathy. At times she imagines herself as a young woman or a child: at others she recalls encounters with Nietzsche, Mozart and heroes from Greek mythology. She could have been the thread of salvation for the displaced hero of Patria 1, but the thread has snapped and she lives a ciphered life of dreams and hallucinations: in the end she threatens and perhaps commits suicide. Completed in 1972, Requiems for the party girl was first performed at the Stratford Festival.

Tthe chamber work for mezzo-soprano Requiems for the party girl (winner of the Fromm Foundation Prize, 1968) reflects a searching, wide-ranging social consciousness which motivates and informs all of Schafer's activities.

The text is written by the composer himself, but he was influenced by Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924) and Albert Camus (1913 - 1960).