There’s nothing wrong with opera. For singers, it’s the hardest genre to sing (even Beyoncé attempted to sing a few measures of “Habanera” from Carmen for a soda commercial a few years ago – and failed,) but if you can sing opera, you can sing anything; for composers, the sky’s the limit: Mozart threw in the highest note ever and the lowest note ever in The Magic Flute, and there’s no such thing as too extravagant – and the same goes for costume designers. Behind all the satin gloves, tuxedos, and white hair in the pompous crowd associated with it, a night at the opera can be hilarious, heartbreaking, and full of beautiful music.
That said – it’s a pleasure to see that The Knife, at the other extreme of music in the world of electronica, has composed an electro-opera as well as written the libretto for it (even Mozart didn’t write the words for his own operas.) Excerpt:
An intersection of the plain
by the bank of some great stream
the animal carcasses
and skeletons would be
entombed
Tomorrow in a year
tomorrow in a million years
Since it’s The Knife we’re talking about, it goes without saying that there must be some cool, eccentric catch to it all. Yes, well, the opera is about the world through the eyes of Darwin, in honor of the 150th birthday of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Differing from traditional operas that tend to have a 4 or so main characters on top of a chorus of 30, The Knife’s opera, Tomorrow, in a Year has 3 singers (only) and 6 dancers that perform to choreography by renowned Japanese modern dancer Hiroaki Umeda.
Tomorrow, in a Day will be residing at the Danish theatre Hotel Pro Forma, and will be touring in Switzerland, Germany, and France.
Here’s a video from the show, maybe it’ll even provoke you to take a trip to Europe:
