The Fall of the House of Commons

A contemporary opera about the “broken ecosystem of postmodern cities”, as viewed by its creators. Increasingly reminiscent of a reflection on a turned off high-definition screen, the interior of present-day apartments is home to a mysterious co-existence of human and artificial intelligence. Home delivery is being provided for all the goods; relationships are woven together and burst out within; fantasies sound like ringtones.

Conversing with Edgar Allan Poe’s iconic short story “The Fall of the House of Ushers”, where house and tenants had merged into a closed circuit, the play trails the sounds produced by life within and outside the walls of today’s commonest kind of apartment. The self-referential universe of the couple inhabiting this apartment walks on a spectral balance. The anthropomorphic supervisor, Erika_7, always available to rewrite the memory of the house and provide solutions to the crossword puzzle of co-habitation, is a prominent figure here.

The dramaturgical dialogue with Poe is employed to demonstrate a juxtaposition of highbrow and kitsch as well as the functional combination of musical idioms from the archive of classic melodrama and the multistylistic assemblages of postmodern music. The musical composition draws on a wide range of genres, focusing on new hybrid trends of 21st-century vocal music.