Schlaflos

In the organizer's words:

Opera ballad based on "Trilogy" by Jon Fosse
Music by Peter Eötvös
Libretto by Mari Mezei
German translation by Errico Fresis /
in German with surtitles

Cooperation with the Graz Opera

In "Trilogy", Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse tells the story of a love on the margins of society. The gripping and sonorous musical theater adaptation was "World Premiere of the Year 2021" and is the penultimate opera by composer Peter Eötvös, who died in March 2024.

Set somewhere between a road movie and a Christmas story, the operatic ballad tells the story of the young couple Asle and Alida, who are destitute and looking for help, shelter and a place in society. Although Alida is heavily pregnant, no door opens for them. Violence arises out of hopeless need, setting in motion a spiral of death and despair. Asle pays with his life and Alida learns that her love for him will not end even after Asle's death.

"Sleepless" tells of exclusion and marginalization and of the rupture in a society in which there is hardly any solidarity. But Eötvös' music gives the lie to the supposed lack of perspective. It shies away from neither beauty of sound nor tonality and counters the gloomy reality with the power of love as a transformative force. In his scenic interpretation, director Philipp M. Krenn does not bring the work into the present day, but locates Eötvös' parable in Berlin in the 1980s, in which an increasingly affluent, post-war Western society abandons those who have fallen out of the system to their fate without so much as a shrug of the shoulders.