À l'extrême bord du monde
"This commission is the final link in a chain of miracles." (continued). We write September 1 of the 2020 corona year. After months of lockdown, La Monnaie announces its rescheduled autumn programme. The first opera for which an audience is allowed back in the Great Hall? À l’extrême bord du monde, Harold Noben’s chamber opera about the last days of writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte, just before their suicide in Petrópolis, Brazil. Whereas the planning of an opera house is normally fixed for years, this piece now unexpectedly gets the chance to have its world premiere at La Monnaie. The arrival of the piano quartet is hanging by a thread, in just a few weeks a semi-staged production must be worked out and the number of rehearsal days in La Monnaie are very limited. But Leonard Bernstein already knew that "to achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time." The creation on 4 October is such a success that General director Peter de Caluwe promptly asks the composer for a new symphonic creation...