Скачать или смотреть love fail, sung by SAGA Vokalensemble, music and text by David Lang, lyrics by Lydia Davies.

Short video clip from our performance of love fail, recorded live in Copenhagen 2023.

Review of our performance in “Seismograph” BY MARIE-LOUISE ZERVIDES 24 MAY 2023:

“The fleeting speech of love

It is chillingly beautiful when a Danish female quartet interprets David Lang's »Love Fail« about the complexities between two people.

»The thing that makes love precious for all of us, not just for fairytale creatures and mythical opera heroes, is that my love is just as meaningful and just as exalted and just as doomed.« (David Lang in The New York Times , 2012)
American David Lang had just won a Pulitzer Prize for his oratorio The Little Match Girl Passion when he was commissioned to write a work for Anonymous 4, a female quartet known for their interpretations of medieval polyphony. This led to the work Love Fail, which, in its intermingling of medieval and modern minimalism, reflects on the ecstasy and downfall of love.
We are not used to operas like this
Love Fail was originally written for concert use, but can also be staged as an opera, which the SAGA Vocal Ensemble with opera singers Lykke Appelon Ilkjær, Angelica Asp, Freja Eva Lockenwitz and Nanna Varmer Ipsen has just proved, together with director Selma Mongelard and video artist Magnus Pind, first on Den Fynske Opera and later at Nørrebro's Literaturhaus, where I experienced the work.

We are not used to operas like this.
First, Love Fail is not a narrative work at all, and like the oratorio The Little Match Girl Passion, it is simply composed for unaccompanied voices and some simple percussion. David Lang himself wrote the majority of the libretto based on various medieval poems of the myth of Tristan and Isolde, but cuts the texts to the bone and removes any kind of history that places the work in a medieval world. The two characters are called "he" and "she", for example, and the external circumstances that normally drive the action in the myth instead become an internal and abstract narrative. Lang also includes poems and micro-novellas by Lydia Davis, which, like the myth, examine love and respect between two people in a more modern way, where the mythical becomes everyday. Love Fail spans a little over an hour and consists of 15 short sections that are independent of time and place. It gives an experience of the constantly changing emotions and moods that you can experience in love relationships. We never really get to know the work's two characters, but we feel everything the feel.

They "are" no longer
The work opens with »He was and she was«, where the couple are introduced and placed opposite each other in a simplification of Gottfried von Strassburg's medieval poem. The emotional complexity of the scene lives in the contrast between the description of the hyper- beautiful features of the characters – »she was so charming / she was so lovely / he was an admirable man / he was a successful man / etc.« – and the intensely sad nature of the music. The gloomy music around »he was« is almost tearful with sticky dissonances, sinister echoes and percussive whispers, whereas »she was« brings more warmth and lyrical gentleness.
"Was" is the key word here, and it exudes regret and loss. Lang makes us meditate on the fact that they 'were' and no longer ‘are'.
The text lets the singers act as narrators, because they do not sing »I« and »you«, but rather »she« and »he« and can thus maintain an emotional distance to the characters. The four singers are coolly lit and stand in oversized menswear with pale faces and black makeup that makes their eyes deep and hollow like ghosts. Glowing on the screen in the background is warm intimate flashbacks of a happy wine drinking woman, which, like the words, seem like an imaginative self-belief of a happier time. However, something is glooming under the surface. We can hear and feel it, but we will never know what it is.

The words are so sensual you can almost taste them and I dream of seeing them lit up on the back wall.
Like the hypnotic vocal music of his popular composer colleague Caroline Shaw, Lang's a cappella works are composed with clean and open timbres that usually call for an almost clinically homogenous sound. SAGA Vocal Ensemble goes a bit against this practice and instead makes space for the singers' individual, operatic voice profiles, which feels enormously strong and honest. We experience a union of four women full of feeling and body, and they stand side by side as a community of sisters.

Love Fail examines the complexities of human relationships with intense intimacy. The work's strongest element is that it is written exclusively for female voices and explores the female experience in a complex, deep and human way. It is certainly not the perspective we are used to experiencing in opera. With simple scenic means, SAGA Vocal Ensemble focuses on the ringing voices and delivers this insanely demanding work beautifully and with great expressiveness.

It is impressive and admirable.