House of Creations

“Liebe das, was nothwendig ist!” [Love what is necessary], as Nietzsche would say. But are the anonymous characters in Bassem Akiki’s first opera capable of that? Drawing on Racine’s Andromaque and Sartre’s Huis clos, the Lebanese-Polish librettist, composer and conductor tells the story of three doomed souls, who find themselves in a space from which there is no escape. What crimes have brought them here, and what is their relationship with the boy who comes to visit them? Using a whole new musical system of his own, Bassem Akiki creates a score in which time and space merge in a new dimension, blurring the boundaries of true events and mythology, past and present. Amor fati, ‘opera noir’?