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Opera in two parts, sung in German.
Music by Detlev Glanert, Libretto by Reinhard Palm after the novel by Stanisław Lem.
Duration about 2 ¼ hours (Interval after Act I)
Detlev Glanert’s opera Solaris, based on the celebrated science fiction novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem (published in Warsaw in 1961), will receive its premiere performance in the Bregenz Festspielhaus on July 18, 2012.
Solaris is the story of the psychologist Kelvin, who is dispatched to a space station which is orbiting the planet Solaris and on which strange things have been happening for some time. Plagued by guilt and memories of his deceased lover, the scientist Kelvin suffers from more and more irrational feelings as the story progresses. Shortly after arriving, Kelvin is warned by weird apparitions. Not long afterwards a very personal phantom appears in the form of his lover Harey, who killed herself. Now she accompanies him, reviving guilty memories of their love affair.
Responsibility, remembrance, remorse. In Lem’s Solaris, science fiction is not an end in itself but a vehicle for constructing a metaphor for the moral problem of guilt and memory and for our strategies of dealing with them. Lem presents possible reactions of people who are directly confronted by a quasi-physical manifestation of a memory: suppression by various technical means, resignation, and the acceptance of responsibility.
Detlev Glanert, born in Hamburg 1960, is regarded as a wizard of sound and a masterly orchestrator. Among his chief influences are Gustav Mahler with his emotionally founded view of the world, and Maurice Ravel with his artificial-sensuous sonic landscapes
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