Jarrell: Cassandre

Within Michael Jarrell’s œuvre, Cassandre represents the culmination and synthesis of an initial and extremely fruitful creative period, even if the selection of the work’s text was “dictated” to him by Christa Wolf in both musical and expressive aspects. The figure of the Trojan priestess, reinterpreted by the German author, is torn back and forth between images of the past and of impending catastrophe. Neither Wolf nor Jarrell himself means to plunge us into the midst of the Trojan War: Cassandra speaks merely of her memory of the events. (Martin Kaltenecker)