Coda
Take a look in advance
She can’t do it anymore: join the barricades, enter politics, or invest in renewable energy. Magda is 100 years old and is living out her final hours. She still has a bottle to finish and wants to say one last thing. Because if stories exist to pass on life’s lessons, what shouldn’t be buried with her? Cello Octet Amsterdam and Sophie van Winden perform a musical death scene exploring the question: what do we leave behind? Featuring music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and new text by Sophie van Winden.
Magda makes one last attempt to capture our imagination…
She can’t do it anymore: join the barricades, enter politics, or invest in renewable energy. Magda is 100 years old and is living out her final hours. She still has a bottle to finish and wants to say one last thing. Because if stories exist to pass on life’s lessons, what shouldn’t be buried with her? Cello Octet Amsterdam and Sophie van Winden perform a musical death scene exploring the question: what do we leave behind? Featuring music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and new text by Sophie van Winden.
Magda makes one last attempt to spark our imagination. Fueled by her love for those she leaves behind and accompanied by the music of composer and climate activist Ryuichi Sakamoto, she takes her audience on a journey 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, ranging from Couperus’ *Eline Vere* to Werner Schwab’s *Grollfeuer*, on the music of Sakamoto, who wrote and performed his own musical death scene, and finally on philosopher Chris Julien’s “Heading for Extinction” talk.
For Ryuichi Sakamoto, his music was linked to the struggle 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 reflected, sitting at the piano, on 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.
When
- Saturday, January 23, 2027 8 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. Buy tickets
- Sunday, January 24, 2027 4 p.m.-5:30 p.m. Buy tickets