Not Mozart: Letters, Riddles and Writs

Letters, Riddles and Writs is a one act opera for television by Michael Nyman broadcast in 1991.

The Austrian

A woman is detained at La Conciergerie. She's 37 but her hair are already white. She's suffering from terrible haemorraghe. Her name is Marie-Antoinette of Lorraine, from Austria, and she's living her last four days.

Aurélien

France, 1920s: An affluent ladies' man finds himself in love with a homely married woman.

Jean Galmot, aventurier

Evocation of the life of the journalist Jean Galmot, adventurer, who established himself as a gold digger in Guyana in 1906. Madly in love with this country, he will die for having wanted to give dignity and freedom to the Guyanese people.

Appetite

The guests of the Station Hotel have assembled to play a game of cards. The loser will sleep in room 207, a room rumored to be haunted. It hasn't been slept in for 20 years. As their lives tangle in a paranoid deadlock, the only escape becomes murder.

Bogus

Recently orphaned, a young boy is taken in by his godmother who is shocked to realize that she can see the boy's imaginary friend: a flamboyant, French magician named Bogus.

Kurt Gerrons Karussell

This documentary tells the story of an unusual victim of the Nazi holocaust -- Kurt Gerron, a German film actor and cabaret star. During World War II, Gerron went from being a leading light of the German entertainment community (he made over 70 films and sang "Mack the Knife" in the first performance of The Three-Penny Opera) to a prisoner directing a propaganda film for the Nazis about a makeshift club at Theresienstadt, which was described as a "concentration camp for celebrities." Gerron was eventually executed at Auschwitz. Director Ilon...

Moscow Parade

River Made to Drown In

Thaddeus Mackenzie, a wealthy lawyer, learns that he is dying and decides to sell all of his property and visit his old friend Allen Hayden. Allen is a struggling artist with a passion for life who once survived by working the streets, but now is romantically involved with Eva, a wealthy European gallery owner living in L.A. Thaddeus implores Allen to find Jamie, a young street hustler that Thaddeus had once tried to rescue. Allen returns to the streets to face the dark corners of his past where he must choose between what he left behind and...

The Michael Nyman Songbook

Ute Lemper sings a collection of art songs by Michael Nyman based on texts by Paul Celan, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, William Shakespeare and Arthur Rimbaud. It was filmed at the Musikhalle, Hamburg, 4 February 1992.

In Search of Cabaret