INES

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, which is used to determine incidents in nuclear power plants (International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale), the composer Ondrˇej Adámek and the librettist & director Katharina Schmitt develop with "INES”, their second joint work, an opera that takes place at the Anthropocene epoch.

O is filled with an irrepressible grief because his lover E is dead. He can no longer hear her, no longer remember her face and would like to become a shadow himself.

The Orpheus myth, which established the genre 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 lover Eurydice to the realm of shadows, but succeeds in conquering plants and animals, even the gods, with his song and brings Eurydice out of the underworld. On his way back to the light, Orpheus, despite a prohibition, turns to Eurydice and loses her a second time.

Between absolute silence and deafening noise, nuclear winter and heat, glaring light and absolute darkness, the characters in "INES" sing about human limits and the difficulties of overcoming them. Ondrˇej Adámek enables us to hear how the human voice, indeed all human senses, change as a result of the nuclear accident, how O finds his way from a speaking 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 separated from each other forever. For while O exists in the linear time of the living, E is absorbed in the timelessness of the dead and must watch her body become an immobile and transparent shell.

Conceived as a large choral opera, "INES" reveals beyond the principle of the individual, how catastrophes have always directly affected us as a collective and how themes such as memory, trauma, oblivion and death are constantly repeated.