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Aug 01, 2025
Shirley Apthorp

The Same River Once

Concerts Behind the Music

Cathy Milliken and Bertolt Brecht are, give or take a few decades, neighbours. Cathy’s Berlin home literally adjoins the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre that Brecht founded and ran in 1950s East Berlin, and the writer’s erstwhile home is just around the corner.

Talking with the composer and her actor sister, Angie Milliken, requires different sorts of temporal and geographic sleight of hand; Angie is still based in Brisbane, where Cathy grew up, and Zoom helps to bridge the distance between us.

Berliner Ensemble

Berliner Ensemble

Numerous other tectonic shifts were necessary for a major new work Sonnet of an Emigrant (2025): First, a commission from Musica Viva Australia for a piece for the Takács Quartet; then, a composing residency at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, where Brecht lived and worked after fleeing from Nazi Germany; and, finally, a visit by Angie during the residency, 'soaking in the atmosphere of what that experience must have been like'.

'It was,' recalls Cathy, 'a happy melding of interest and passion.'

After long and careful reflection, Cathy chose eight of Brecht’s sonnets, pinning them to her kitchen wall, moving pages until a clear emotional curve emerged—shock, longing, urgency, reflection, guarded optimism. She briefly considered ending with 'I shall never see...', then rejected it—too bleak—in favour of Alles wandelt sich ('Everything changes').

She wanted ‘a language which was not ornate’, mirroring Brecht’s stripped-down diction. Angie served as her first listener: 'If it didn’t ring true to me, I’d say.' Cathy kept adjusting: 'Nobody wins if the text can’t be heard,' she explains, and so pauses and tempi shifted until every word landed cleanly.

The sonnets date from 1940–42, when Brecht moved between Scandinavia and California, fearful of Nazi reach and wary of McCarthyism and the FBI. Their imagery—letters in the post, newspapers, old books—may be historical, but the Millikens hear them everywhere.

'When they were living in Los Angeles,' Angie says, 'and the end of the Second World War was declared, Brecht immediately started thinking, where do we go next? What’s our next move?'

'That sense of being chased, of never settling—that’s still very much alive now.'

Cathy agrees. 'I think what he experienced was this ever-changing existence. He left his writing desk, his settled life, and moved into something unstable, on the run all the time. And yet he managed to write from inside that instability.'

Through flight, exile, yearning, and the search for belonging, Cathy’s libretto settles on the immutability of change: 'You cannot shake off the water you poured into the wine,' Brecht acknowledges; 'you can begin again with your last breath.'

'That’s where I wanted to land,' Cathy explains. 'Because exile is movement, and sometimes that movement carries hope.'

Cathy Milliken. Photo credit: Annika Bauer

Cathy Milliken. Photo credit: Annika Bauer

The conversation turns to Gaza, to the Ukrainian refugees adapting to Berlin life, to German right-wing debates about 're-migration' and Australian internment camps. Art, Cathy believes, still has a role in all this. 'It doesn’t always have to be political. But it can bring things into focus—quietly, suddenly. Even just the act of bringing old literature back into circulation can be powerful.'

Angie agrees. 'There’s a kind of desensitisation happening, a feeling of helplessness, or even apathy. But I really believe that in art, there’s a chance for re-sensitisation. The work has a quiet intensity that builds without you really knowing it. It sneaks under your skin.'

Composer and actor share overlapping tools. As an oboist and founding member of Germany’s cutting-edge Ensemble Modern, Cathy’s performances have often involved acting; Angie studied music before turning to stage and screen. In every line of the score, Cathy wrote with her sister’s voice in mind.

'Angie is my voice of truth,' she says. 'She nudges me when something is off. She brings this incredible sensitivity, a deep knowledge of text.'

'She’s not just reading it—she’s inhabiting it.'

Angie’s role is not one of declamation or recitation. 'I’m the fifth instrument,' she says. 'It’s intimate—four string players and me. There are parts where they’re waiting for me, and parts where I’m counting like mad to stay with them. It’s exposed. But it’s also a co-creation. Every performance will be different.'

The Takács Quartet, too, was written into the DNA of the piece. Though she had known of the ensemble for many years, Cathy first heard them play live in Santa Monica, while still in residence at Villa Aurora.

'They’re incredibly powerful,' she says. 'A classical-romantic quartet with a long history—and a history of exile, too. Their sound is so unified, but within that you can hear four distinct languages.'

Villa Aurora

Villa Aurora

For Cathy, living next door to Bertolt Brecht is just part of a broader connection, including links to composers who worked with Brecht during his lifetime. Her musical lineage includes years working with Heiner Goebbels on the music of Hanns Eisler, and she knows musicians who had performed under Paul Dessau at the Berliner Ensemble. 'That all fed in,’ she says. ‘But at some point I had to make my own way through, especially as a non-German.'

Her own way includes the deft use of silence and space. The string-players might graze the bridge for a breath-like hiss, then dissolve into stillness.

'There’s urgency, intensity, but also space and breath,' Angie says. 'Cath’s music moves deftly between emotional immediacy and objectivity. There’s great range within it. And what I love is that it lets the audience inhabit that space too.'

Cathy agrees. 'I was very conscious of not being ornate. I wanted clarity of purpose. Each poem has its own world. I tried to reflect that, and also the fluctuation—the fragility of the moment.'

They sisters have collaborated before—on Hamlet Link, and later Songs of Love and War—but this feels different.

'In those earlier works, the musicians had to follow me,' Angie says. 'This time, I’m one of them.'

Their rehearsal window is short: two days in Berlin, one on site. But there’s trust. 'The printed page is just so strong,' Cathy says. 'It’s daunting, actually. I just want to let Brecht speak.'

Part of the work’s tension emerges from its scale: modest, precise, intimate. The listener is invited to imagine writing to a loved one they may never see again, or trying to plan a future when nothing in the present is stable.

'It’s not about reducing the text to what I feel,' Angie says. 'There’s a much larger canvas I want to expand into. It’s a universal experience. And it’s happening again.'

Alles wandelt sich. Everything changes. It’s a closing line—but not a full stop. 

Takács Quartet appears with Angie Milliken, performing Sonnet of an Emigrant by Cathy Milliken. Touring to Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth from 14 - 25 August. 

Tickets start from $65, or $49 for under 40s and $20 student rush (available 48 hours prior).