Mixed-composer ballet / dance work including music by Lera Auerbach
Sueño de la Razón**
Goyo Montero’s ballet / dance work for Staatstheater Nürnberg Ballett, inspired by Francisco de Goya’s “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” and shaped by a mixed-composer sound world including Lera Auerbach.
Catalogue Status
A mixed-composer ballet / dance work including music by Lera Auerbach.
Title Source
The title invokes Goya’s “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.” The dream, or sleep, of reason produces monsters: Montero’s work turns this phrase into a theatrical world of perception, illness, artistic vision, and hallucination.
Sound World
Beethoven, Set Fire to Flames, Jonny Greenwood, Lera Auerbach, Diego Carrasco, Michael Gordon. The ballet is not a single-composer score but a curated musical dramaturgy of reason, dream, rupture, body, and monstrous image.
Work Information
Creative Team
Musical Dramaturgy
Music Used in the Ballet
- Ludwig van Beethoven Beethoven anchors the work in the history of reason, subjectivity, deafness, struggle, and Enlightenment-era musical imagination.
- Set Fire to Flames Experimental, post-rock sound material contributing to the ballet’s unstable contemporary atmosphere.
- Jonny Greenwood Cinematic and textural material contributing to the work’s filmic construction of perception.
- Lera Auerbach Specific Auerbach excerpt or excerpts to be verified from internal catalogue records or the original programme. Her music forms part of the work’s contemporary psychological register.
- Diego Carrasco Spanish / flamenco-inflected material within the broader sound world.
- Michael Gordon American post-minimalist energy within the ballet’s fractured musical dramaturgy.
The musical structure of Sueño de la Razón is mixed and deliberately unstable. Beethoven evokes the Enlightenment, heroic subjectivity, and the historical promise of reason; Goya’s title reverses that promise into dream, illness, nightmare, and monstrous image.
Around Beethoven, Montero builds a contemporary sound field with Set Fire to Flames, Jonny Greenwood, Lera Auerbach, Diego Carrasco, and Michael Gordon. The result is not a single-composer ballet score, but a curated musical dramaturgy of reason, hallucination, memory, body, and destabilized perception.
Within this mixed-composer architecture, Auerbach’s music should be understood as part of the ballet’s contemporary psychological register. Until the exact excerpt is verified, the page identifies her presence conservatively: the work includes music by Lera Auerbach as one element in Montero’s sound world of reason, dream, artistic illness, and fractured vision.
The Work
Sueño de la Razón — El Sueño de la Razón / Der Traum der Vernunft — is Goyo Montero’s ballet / dance work for Staatstheater Nürnberg Ballett, premiered on 19 June 2010 at the Opernhaus Nürnberg. The title invokes Francisco de Goya’s famous formulation: El sueño de la razón produce monstruos — the dream, or sleep, of reason produces monsters.
Montero’s work brings together Goya and Beethoven as conceptual poles: the painter of nightmare, grotesque, and social disorder, and the composer associated with reason, subjectivity, deafness, and heroic struggle. Rather than presenting a linear story, the ballet constructs a theatrical field of simultaneous perceptions: exterior reality, inner world, illness, artistic vision, and hallucination.
The work is closely connected to Montero’s fascination with filmic construction. Scenes are built so that the outside world, inner states, and the perceptions of disturbed or ill artists can be experienced at the same time. The viewer’s eye becomes active: it assembles, compares, and interprets images rather than simply following a conventional plot.
The production’s visual authorship belongs to Verena Hemmerlein and Goyo Montero, with lighting by Olaf Lundt and Montero. The visual world should be understood as integral to the dramaturgy: not decorative setting, but a theatrical field in which Goya’s image-world, Beethoven’s interiority, and Montero’s cinematic construction of perception converge.
Context and Significance
Sueño de la Razón belongs to Goyo Montero’s formative Nuremberg period, when he was establishing Staatstheater Nürnberg Ballett as an ensemble defined by physically charged narrative and image-based dance theatre.
The work follows Montero’s Romeo and Juliet and stands before later Nuremberg creations such as Carmen, Der Nussknacker, Don Juan, and Faust. It is one of the early major Montero works in which literary, visual, musical, and cinematic references are fused into a concentrated stage language.
Performance History
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19 Jun 2010World premiere at the Opernhaus Nürnberg / Staatstheater Nürnberg, performed by Staatstheater Nürnberg Ballett.
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2009/10Listed in the Staatstheater Nürnberg / Verena Hemmerlein production context for the 2009/10 season.
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2010/11Listed in repertory / production archive context for the following season.
Online Materials
References, Video, Production Sources
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VideoStaatstheater Nürnberg / YouTube
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ArchiveStaatstheater Nürnberg Archive Staatstheater Nürnberg Fundus
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Work PageGoyo Montero Work Page Goyo Montero
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Design ArchiveVerena Hemmerlein Production Archive Verena Hemmerlein
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Interview / ContextOper & Tanz Portrait Oper & Tanz
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Anniversary BookletStaatstheater Nürnberg Ballett XV Jahre Staatstheater Nürnberg
Rights and Materials
Music rights and production documentation require separate clearance. This page documents a mixed-composer ballet / dance work including music by Lera Auerbach. For staging, image use, music excerpts, archival reproduction, and production documentation, consult the relevant rights holders, Staatstheater Nürnberg, the choreographer’s archive, and the publishers of the musical works used.
