Der Mieter (The Tenant) (2017)
(Opera after motifs of “Le locataire chimérique” by Roland Topor)

There is a housing shortage. Georg is therefore happy to have found a room at all. The previous tenant is dead. She threw herself out of the window.

Soon after Georg moves in, however, the other tenants begin to interfere with his life and habits. At first, there are just complaints about alleged noise nuisance (they knock on the walls and advise him to wear felt slippers). Then Georg is told to take part in evicting other tenants from the house. All of this takes place against the backdrop of an increasing climate of fear, intimidation and – most seriously – the gradual self-restraint and anticipatory obedience on Georg's part. He must not lose his room, and so his radius of action and movement becomes ever narrower. The (living) space around him literally contracts. Ultimately, it remains unclear whether the threat is real or whether it is just nesting in his head – like a progressive paranoia. And so Georg drifts towards the complete loss of his identity. He gradually develops the idea that he is being forced to suffer the same fate as his previous tenant. And the ultimate consequence of this is that Georg is to merge with the person of his previous tenant. As a result, he not only loses his identity as Georg, but also turns from a man into a woman and, having become a woman, takes his own life.

The opera Der Mieter is loosely based on motifs from the novel Le locataire chimérique by Roland Topor, which was made into a film by Roman Polanski under the title The Tenant.