Peter Eötvös
(c) Istvan Huszti
During their European tour 2015, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic will premiere a new one-act opera, Senza Sangue by Peter Eötvös on 1st May 1 in Cologne, Germany. The stage premiere of Senza Sangue, Eötvös’s 10th opera, will take place in 2016 in Avignon, France, alongside Bartok’s Bluebeard.
Peter Eötvös has composed his opera Senza sangue for 2 singers and orchestra after the eponymous novel by Alessandro Baricco. The liobretto has been written by Mari Mezei and is based on the concluding portion of the novel. It tells the story of a single dramatic encounter.
During a civil war, a man and his companions killed the entire family of a certain young girl. The plot of the one-act opera spans many decades, from the moment where the girl looks in the eyes of the twenty-year-old boy who has shot her father but spared her own life, until their new encounter many decades later.
In the course of their conversation, the story takes a new turn. The woman has not come to avenge herself but to be saved by the man once again. She longs to relive that glance from long ago: « He who has saved us once, can do so again and again.”
Peter Eötvös says: « Questions, singularly timely today, remain unanswered. Can murder be excused by faith in a better world? Can revenge save a broken life? Was the fight for a better world in vain if it did not succeed? There are no answers, but the characters know that their lives became inextricably intertwined on that fateful day; only through each other can they ever hope to make life meaningful again. This is beautifully symbolized by the old woman’s hope to have her name restored and to erase the past through her encounter with the man. »
