„Ich höre die Steine, sehe den Klang und lese das Wasser“

Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka opens the door to a fascinating and hitherto little-explored art form: auditory music theater, which dissolves conventional boundaries between sound, space, and visual staging. At the heart of this is the question of how perception itself becomes a stage when sound spaces embody architectural principles, voices oscillate between the physical and the abstract, and listening takes center stage as a performative, physical act.

The author combines perspectives from musicology, theater studies, and cultural studies into an interdisciplinary methodology that goes beyond traditional work analysis. Using detailed case studies—including Luigi Nono’s epoch-making “audio tragedy” Prometeo, Beat Furrer’s expansive audio theater FAMA, Adriana Hölszky’s sound theater tragödia, and the atmospheric music theater works of Klaus Lang and Chaya Czernowin—she demonstrates how these works reconfigure our hearing. Space becomes an instrument, the voice a sonic topography, and architectural structures such as the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci sequence find their echo in compositional techniques.

Maierhofer-Lischka offers a particularly compelling analysis of how Renzo Piano’s mobile wooden structure “arca” for Nono’s *Prometeo* or Peter Bürgler’s movable sound box for Furrer’s *FAMA* transform the performance space itself into an active participant—the boundary between stage and audience dissolves, creating an immersive sound experience that engages all the senses. Through multimodal concepts of perception that intertwine hearing, seeing, feeling, and even smelling, unique narratives emerge beyond traditional narrative forms. Choral elements open up ritual and social dimensions, while the staging of the human voice—from whispers and breath to screams—creates a haunting vocal intensity that mediates between language, sound, and physicality.

The book also explores how acoustic narrativity functions in audio-musical theater: text fragments, streams of consciousness, and intertextual references create a non-linear narrative that actively involves the audience in the construction of meaning. An examination of genre terms—from “audio tragedy” to “speech-sound theater”—shows how this hybrid art form situates itself beyond established categories, thereby opening up new perspectives on the relationship between music and theater.

The book will be released on March 31 and is now available for pre-order.