Beat Furrer calls his 2005 work FAMA a listening musical theatre. That phrase matters because this is not a piece about spectacle or storytelling in the usual sense. It is about the act of listening itself — and what it means to really hear in a world where noise, speed, and distraction often drown out clarity.
I first heard FAMA at its premiere in Donaueschingen. The performance space was dominated by a large box, into which the audience was seated. This box wasn’t a stage prop but an instrument in itself. Its panels could rotate: metallic ones reflected sound into sharp echoes, while softer ones absorbed resonance into silence. Adjustable openings let sound leak in or out, so every shift altered our perception of distance, focus, and presence. From inside, you were constantly negotiating what was near, what was far, and what was real.
The first movement was powerful. The choir, amplified and positioned around the hall, overwhelmed the soundscape, while the instrumental ensemble encircled the box. At the center, the protagonist Else — drawn from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Fräulein Else — spoke only a few words. The clearest of them: “I want to move on.”
Else is a young woman trapped between her own desires and the suffocating expectations of society. Furrer turns this inner struggle into sound. Metallic crotales shimmer with string harmonics, and a looping octatonic glissando slides endlessly upward and downward. It creates the illusion of forward motion, yet circles back on itself, mirroring Else’s paralysis.
But FAMA is not just Else’s story. In the early 2000s, Austria was itself caught in a similar loop. The rise of Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party, heated debates over immigration, and the struggle to accept social diversity all created an atmosphere of fear and division. The public sphere became an echo chamber: voices bounced back louder and harsher, until the truth was nearly impossible to hear.
That is exactly how the box sounded when its metallic panels closed. Echoes collided so quickly that the music blurred into chromatic chaos. Only by listening carefully could you perceive the underlying line — a simple, steady pattern shaping the whole piece beneath the noise.
This is the lesson of FAMA. Listening here is not a passive act, but an active one. It asks us to filter illusion from substance, just as societies must learn to separate empty slogans from genuine voices. Furrer forces us to inhabit confusion until we sharpen our attention and hear more deeply.
For me, this is what makes FAMA resonate beyond its premiere. It is both a musical experiment and a political metaphor: a reminder that listening carefully — to one another, to truth, to the quieter voices easily drowned out — is the only way to move forward.
