Conceived as a large-scale choral opera, "Ines" points beyond the principle of the individual, as catastrophes have always affected us directly as a collective and themes such as memory, trauma, forgetting and death are constantly repeated.
A young man, a woman dying of an unexplained illness, characters possessed by strange voices - a love story and the world after a nuclear disaster. Based on the INES scale (International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale), which is used to determine incidents in nuclear power plants, composer Ondrˇej Adámek and librettist and director Katharina Schmitt develop a piece of music theater at the end of the Anthropocene with "INES" in their second joint work. O is filled with irrepressible grief because his lover E is dead. He can no longer hear her, can no longer remember her face and would prefer to become a shadow himself.
The Orpheus myth, which founded the form of opera itself with Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo", also tells one of the most touching love stories of all time - the story of Orpheus, who loses his beloved Eurydice to the realm of shadows, but manages to conquer plants and animals, even the gods, with his song and bring Eurydice out of the underworld. On his way back to the light, Orpheus turns to Eurydice, despite a prohibition, and loses her a second time.
Between absolute silence and deafening noise, atomic winter and heat, glistening light and absolute darkness, the characters in "Ines" sing about human limits and the difficulties of overcoming them. Ondrˇej Adámek lets us hear how the voice, indeed all human senses, change as a result of the nuclear accident, how O finds her way from a speaking voice to a singing voice and E disintegrates into the sea of voices in the afterlife. The unity of place and time also seems to be dissolved, the lovers eternally separated from each other. For while O is in the linear time of the living, E is absorbed in the timelessness of the dead and has to watch as her body becomes an immobile and transparent shell.
World premiere June 16, 2024
Further performances: June 22, 26, 28 and 30 as well as July 3, 2024
