It always has a special charm when someone with average talent tells you about a highly gifted, even brilliant person: he or she has enough talent and judgment to recognize the genius, but not enough skills to hold a candle to it can. But at least he has enough empathy and imagination to conjure up the life of this brilliant person. A trick that already worked perfectly with Miloš Forman’s “Amadeus” – here it was the Viennese court composer Salieri who reported on the fate of his contemporary Mozart.
In the case of “Novecento – the Legend of the Ocean Pianist”, which has now premiered at the Hofspielhaus, it is the trumpeter Tim who reports on the fictional life of his friend Danny Boodman TD Lemon Novecento – a virtuoso pianist with whom he played in the 1920s. and early 1930s played in the onboard band on the ocean liner “Virginian”.
The two friends as well as all other characters, from the grumpy ship captain to the pragmatic machinist adoptive father to the historically existing but fictionally competing “inventor of jazz” Jelly Roll Morton, are all embodied by a single actor, Henry Arnold. A challenge for the actor (known from Edgar Reitz’s “Heimat” film series) and studied pianist, which he solves with impressive versatility, verve and dexterity in the direction of Georg Büttel. In order to tell the story of the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco from 1994 (which was made into a film a few years later by the director Giuseppe Tornatore with Tim Roth in the title role and music by Ennio Morricone), not much is necessary thanks to Arnold’s strong stage presence: A grand piano with a stool, a ship’s trunk and a lifebuoy are enough for the small play area of the Hofspielhaus.
This one-man show is nothing less than a philosophy about a successful – or failed – artist’s life, depending on how you look at it. Because this Novecento, born and abandoned as an infant on the ocean liner, never leaves it. Even when he tries once, at the age of 32, he turns back on the second step of the footbridge. Much later, shortly before his death, he will confess to his friend why: When he looked at the city of New York, he realized that it had “no end.” And he needs a restriction, just as the keys on his grand piano are limited to the number 88, and the dimensions of the familiar ocean liner limit him.
Instead, the world comes to him, in the form of first class travelers like those on the lower deck. He makes his own observations, for example when the emigrants enter the ship wearing only their proverbial last shirt – but leave it again after 20 days fully equipped: in the meantime they tailor and sew as much as they can – which is why at the end Trip the curtains and sheets are missing.
It is also the emigrants from many different countries of origin that Novecento listens to for its new sounds. “He made a kind of music that didn’t even exist,” states his friend Tim. Arnold demonstrates what it might sound like when he occasionally takes a seat at the grand piano and delights the audience with his emotionally charged piano playing – and makes the poetic sea voyage sound.
Novecento – the legend of the ocean pianist, again on Wednesday, November 29th, 8 p.m., Hofspielhaus, Falkenturmstrasse 8, www.hofspielhaus.de