"->forside

In this second article on Hermes Opera Karl Heinz Jeron is talking on how and where he got the idea for the play.

Hermes Opera: Back story
The idea for Hermes as an opera came when I got really fed up with all these overheard telephone conversation I experienced in public transportations. Like you're on the train for instance from Berlin to Hamburg, sometimes it's really annoying and how loud some of those managers talk about their success, their families, their sex life. And at the specific point I need to find a way to get along with this.

I started taking notes and writing every conversation down in one of my notebooks. I filled notebooks, until now I have almost three filled. In early summer 2011, I don't know how, but I just thought again about my notebooks and all those overheard telephone calls and I thought: Oh maybe it's a good idea to stage these texts.

I thought again and I found this great software, it's called Flinger. It's an opensource thing. It's derived from Festival. It's a text to speech software. And the good thing about Flinger is it enables computers to sing. You can easily use these mechanisms of this software to make tiny robots sing.

I quite liked the idea and this is how I developed the opera because singing robots and theater like situation, well that's and easy step to take until you think: Well theater, singing... it's an opera. That's how I found this idea or this idea came to me or however you might pull it.

Then I easily found specific topics in my notes. Ex. people on the phone in public transportations they are always talk about totally meaningless things like: I'm on the train, where are you, and others are really, sometimes you have the impression that they are not aware anymore that they are surrounded by others, so they start really talking about secret things, they start talking about their sex life, they start talking about betrayal even like really almost cruel little things. And I thought, wow, that's a drama, that's great, you have starting with the secret as a first act and then going further to the sex life and then maybe betrayal or whatever. So this is basically the structure of the opera.