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Sleepless

OPERA BALLAD IN TWO ACTS (2021)

Music by Peter Eötvös
Text by Mari Mezei after »Trilogie« by Jon Fosse

»When it’s out of necessity, anything is permissible, he says. Maybe you’re right, she says.« The place: Bergen, Norway. It’s cold. It’s raining. Asle and the heavily pregnant Alida wander around the coastal city. The young couple are turned away wherever they go. The likes of them are not welcome here. Each pause masks a further drift into a surreal psychological haze. Driven by desperation, they break into a stranger’s house. A series of mysterious encounters in which the past comes to life proves to be a disastrous race against time.

Adapting a short story of the same title by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, the Hungarian conductor-composer Peter Eötvös, one of the most influential figures in new music today, composed »Sleepless« on commission. In it, he and the librettist Mari Mezei interweave snapshots of the existential search for belonging, crime as a response to human indifference and the struggle with a sense of being out of place, generating a kind of suggestive, operatic stream of consciousness. The world premier also marks the Staatsoper Unter den Linden debut of the Hungarian film, theatre and opera director Kornél Mundruczó, well-known for cinematically realistic works that often address contemporary social themes.

Media

»The entire cast, including the offstage women, deliver vocal performances as close to perfection as anyone could wish.«

Financial Times, 29 November 2021

»Eötvös is undoubtedly the master of his craft. Sleepless is beguilingly beautiful, deftly orchestrated and, full of consonant octaves and scales and spiced with judiciously placed dissonances, vividly pictorial throughout. The vocal writing is skilful and slick. Eötvös also conducts, and the outcome is both precise and sumptuous.«

Financial Times, 29 November 2021

»The score is helped along by a superlative cast. As the ill-fated young lovers, Linard Vrielink and Victoria Randem are exquisite – Vrielink all youthful lyricism with an undertone of seething violence, Randem with an ethereal beauty and meltingly lovely top notes.«

Financial Times, 29 November 2021

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  • Auftragswerk und Koproduktion der Staatsoper Unter den Linden und des Grand Théâtre de Genève

  • Mit freundlicher Unterstützung