The King's Gravedigger

Chamber opera project. Semi-finalist of the Almeida Opera Competition.

The hero of this opera is a Polish emigrant working as a grave maker at a German cemetery. His duty is to burn the corpses of deceased nobles. It was not so long ago, during World War II, that Germany legalised the burning of Poles and others in the concentration camps. Today an illegal Polish emigrant burns the German elite into ashes.

He is in a spiral of madness. At first the burning is a kind of catharsis, because his ancestors were killed in a concentration camp. It gives him satisfaction, but not for long. He begins to put the ashes of illegal emigrants into the places prepared for the elite, and uses the ashes of the nobles for the flowers in his garden. Then we realise that the whole theatre is a tomb. The gravedigger wants to burn the world, but stops. What if there is still life, still childhood? What if beauty, and motherhood, are stronger than revenge?

The story tells of the relationship between Poles and Germans, and much more. It unravels a whole nation’s catharsis, and the healing takes place not only in the text but in the music and the video. The libretto is based on a novel by the Polish writer Jerzy Łukosz.

The performer is a contemporary actor, singer and dancer, who does not present himself as an Other but provokes himself into experiencing new modes of living. Live electronics and video establish the musical environment around the presence of a human being: the performer’s gestures are transformed electronically into sound, and the video plays a parallel role to the music. The music builds autonomous senses that confront the meaning of the words, and the visuals are not subordinate to the music but confronted by it. Polish, German and English are used.