“Sleepless” by Péter Eötvös in Graz

Dhe ambience could hardly be more desolate: a realistic depiction of Berlin's Zoological Garden train station in its dilapidated state in the 1980s. As if in mockery, a huge poster is displayed over two exhausted young people crouching on the floor: with the words “Freedom – Experience – Norway” it advertises luxurious cruises in the north. Otherwise, nothing here is reminiscent of the water that is strongly present in the novel “Trilogy” by the Norwegian Jon Fosse, which only drips from the dirty train station toilets on the stage of the Graz Opera. Nevertheless, the situation is clearly outlined by Heike Vollmer's scenery: a dirt-poor, homeless, exhausted and obviously drug-addicted couple is trying to somehow stay afloat.

It is a kind of brutalized Christmas story that Jon Fosse tells in his novel “Trilogy”, which was completed in 2014 and consists of three interrelated novellas. Two seventeen-year-olds – the boy an orphan, the girl rejected by her own mother – search in vain for a place to stay. They finally escape from their fishing village to the small town of Bjørgvin (today: Bergen), where they are particularly frustrated by the harshness of Norwegian society, which denies them entry because they are poor and obviously unmarried and the girl is also pregnant.

The Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös, who has just turned eighty years old (FAZ from January 2nd), took on this masterfully told parable by the Norwegian Nobel Prize winner and created a nearly two-hour opera called “Sleepless,” as the first story in the novel is titled. After the English-language premiere in 2021 at the Berlin State Opera under the title “Sleepless” (FAZ from November 30, 2021), then conducted by the composer himself and staged by Kornél Mundruczó, the work is now available in Austria for the first time and this time also in German experience.

Eötvös describes the fate of Asle and Alida in thirteen scenes with very different tonal compositions. Most of the passages in the libretto by Mari Mezei, the composer's wife, come from the first part of the novel; from the second, the description of the lynching to which Asle falls victim for the murder of an old midwife; from the third the finale, when Alida goes into the water. Dominated by the violin of the minstrel Asle, elements of Norwegian folklore are often incorporated, which symbolize the couple's unwavering love as links. For the numerous leaps in time in which Fosse's protagonists remember the past, the Hungarian composer designed musical dream sequences in which fairytale-like glockenspiel or dark marimba sounds dominate. Three singers placed in two proscenium boxes create an almost surreal atmosphere through excessive triads.