Abendsonne (2024)
(Opera in two acts)

Setting the libretto of Abendsonne to music was a very exciting and rewarding task, as this text encouraged me to push the boundaries musically as well. Rapid changes between grotesque, absurd motifs and tragic, dramatic moments are characteristic of this tragicomedy. In the music, I have used numerous allusions and allusions to famous works of opera literature or representative styles of past eras to make the characteristic moments of my opera even more vivid. Sometimes it is a hidden quotation from Humperdinck's Hänsel and Gretel intended to reinforce a fairytale illusion, sometimes it is a Wagnerian seriousness and timelessness of the extremely low registers, sometimes a tango longing for a distant youth. All these glimpses into musical history, this constant going back in time, are linked to the main theme of the opera – age and the attempt to accept the uncompromising, unstoppable progression of time. In a musical sense, too, two worlds collide in this composition – the realistic, uncompromising and the irrational.

Every time there is an attempt to make contact with the spirits from the afterlife, the music transports us into an illusion of an ever-accelerating, obsessive rotation that wants to pull us out of our lives ‘to the other side’.

The certainty that each of us is getting older and thus closer to our end always carries the two characteristics of a tragicomedy – on the one hand it is the fear of dying, a drama when one wants to confront fate, and on the other hand a certain serene humour that allows us to accept the law of nature.

Tomasz Skweres