Cello Octet / Sophie van Winden - Coda

She still has a bottle to finish and still wants to say something. Because if stories exist to pass on life's lessons, what is it that shouldn't go into the grave with her? Cello Octet Amsterdam and Sophie van Winden perform a musical death scene about the question: what do we leave behind? Featuring music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and a new text by Sophie van Winden.

Magda makes one last attempt to spark our imagination. Fueled by love for those she leaves behind and assisted by the music of composer and climate activist Ryuichi Sakamoto, she takes her audience through all the thousand little things needed to build a new future together, while she herself feels life slipping through her fingers.

The text is inspired by death scenes from world literature, from Couperus’ Eline Vere to Werner Schwab’s Grollfeuer, by the music of Sakamoto, who wrote and performed his own musical death scene, and finally by the Heading for Extinction-talk by philosopher Chris Julien.

For Ryuichi Sakamoto, his music was connected to the fight for a better world. He was the initiator of a major reforestation project and an anti-nuclear activist. In 2022, he became terminally ill. Facing his own death, he contemplated, behind the piano, the legacy he would leave behind. Those meditations during his chemotherapy led to the album 12, which we can hear as his own musical death scene.

"What can I do as a theatre maker in the climate crisis? We started this special project with that question. In the theatre, you have the means to touch the audience in their heart and mind, but also to offer a perspective that is sometimes hard to find among the news facts. I invented a character who, in her final hour, does not fight for her own life, but for hope and care for the earth and the people she leaves behind." Sophie van Winden