Norwegian Theatre II

In 1985, the Norwegian Theatre moved to a new building at 8 Kristian IVs gate. Previously, since 1945, it had been based in a tenement house at 16 Stortingsgata. At the new address, in 1991, the theatre company presented Sophocles’ Antigone, in a translattion by poet Halldis Moren Vesaas and with Arne Nordheim’s music for E flat clarinet, contrabass clarinet, sampler, percussion and cello. The electronic layer of the music was created in cooperation with Mats Claesson in the Electronic Music Studio at the Norwegian Academy of Music. In 1994, at the Lillehamer Winter Olympic Games, an anononymous mediaeval ballad-style vision poem, Draumkvedet, a kind of parallel of Dante’s Divine Comedy, was performed with Nordheim's music. The melodies to the ballad-poem were written down in the mid nineteenth century by Ludvig Mathas Lindeman, who also arranged them for choir. In the twentieth century, the old folk melodies inspired many Norwegian composers to write oratorios, choral works and compositions for piano or organ based on this thematic material. Arne Nordheim created an entirely new musical expression, bringing his work as close as possible to an operatic form. Draumkvedet is one of the key works in his oeuvre.

In 1998, Liv Ullmann debuted as a theatre director with Paul Claudel’s Partage du midi, a drama about worldly and erotic needs as opposed to religious vocation and divine love. It was first performed as a radio play in 1969 under the title Midday Solstice, with tape music by Arne Nordheim.