The Fall of the House of Commons

Alternative Stage Founding Donor

Alternative Stage sponsor: PPC (Public Power Company)

The contemporary opera The Fall of the House of Commons, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s dark universe, brings to  life a fantasy world, a reality not far from ours, on the Alternative Stage.

A contemporary opera about the “broken ecosystem of postmodern cities”, as envisioned by its creators. The inner space of modern apartments more and more reminds us of a reflection on a turned-off high-definition screen, where human and artificial intelligence coexist in a mysterious way. All the goods are home delivered, relationships are formed and break indoors, fantasies sound like phone ringtones.

Conversing with Edgar Allan Poe’s archetypal story The Fall of the House of Usher, where both the house and its residents are merged in a closed circuit, the work tracks the sounds produced by the life inside and outside the walls of a typical contemporary apartment. The self-referential universe of the couple living in it exudes a spectral balance. A dominant position is held by the android supervisor Erika_7, who’s always available to rewrite the house’s memory and offer solutions to the symbiosis crossword puzzle.

Poe’s dramaturgical conversation is used to contrast the sophisticated and the kitschy, but also to functionally combine musical idioms ranging from the repository of classical melodrama to various styles of postmodern music. The musical composition draws upon a wide range of ideas, with a focus on the hybrid trends in 21st-century vocal music.

The production was presented in June 2023 as part of the Athens Epidaurus Festival.