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Solaris
18 July 2012 at 7.30 p.m
Solaris
Bregenz Festival Austria http://www.bregenzerfestspiele.com Responsibility, guilt, memory
What would it be like if some unimaginable force were able to give material form to all our repressed emotions and thoughts? To resurrect, from our memories, people who once were close to us – as beings that confront us with our past and yet remain permanently out of reach and beyond our comprehension? What would happen to us as a result? That is exactly what Solaris is about, the famous novel by Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem published in 1961, and which the German composer Detlev Glanert has now turned into an opera.
Solaris is the story of the psychologist Kelvin, who is dispatched to a space station which is orbiting the distant planet Solaris and on which strange things have been happening. Arriving on board, Kelvin is straight away warned about weird apparitions of the kind that relentlessly plague the crew members. None of the crew seem able to rid themselves of the "guests". It isn't long before Kelvin's personal phantasm appears in the form of his former wife, Harey, who killed herself at the age of nineteen, and who now starts revisiting him.
It is the planet's gigantic ocean which makes all these strange beings materialise, projecting the crew members' feelings of guilt into their lives once again, with persistence and indifference. Haunted by guilty memories, the rational scientist Kelvin is increasingly beset by irrational thoughts and feelings. In the end he is the one most deeply affected by the nightly visitations of beings which the plant bodies forth from the crew members' own memories.
Further performances
22 July - 11.00 a.m.
25 July - 7.30 p.m.
Introductory talk in the Festspielhaus will be start one hour before performance
Detlev Glanert : Solaris
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