Anthony’s Death

The outrageous, exciting and groundbreaking “opera of the absurd” Anthony’s Death by distinguished composer Kharálampos Goyós arrives at the Greek National Opera Alternative Stage in a production by acclaimed stage director Dimitris Karantzas after a first, extremely successful round of streaming broadcasts on the GNO TV platform. This unique work, based on a libretto by Yannis Filias and the composer after the memory of the TV series Candy Candy and the work of Slavoj Žižek, will be performed at the GNO Alternative Stage at the SNFCC on four evenings, namely on 20, 23, 25 and 27 November 2022.

The opera Anthony’s Death is set in an artificial forest clearing in full bloom and is dedicated to all boys who were ashamed to say that they cried with Candy Candy; it is a weird, psychoanalytically-inspired “infernal machine” in which the legacy of the aforementioned Japanese anime TV series provocatively meets the thought of the notorious Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, occasioned by the memory of a fall that traumatised an entire generation. The 7-member instrumental ensemble is conducted by the composer.

Concurrently with the performances of Anthony’s Death, the symposium Anthony at the Clearing: Opera’s Death Drive will be held at the GNO Alternative Stage on 25 and 26 November (starting time: 17.30).

– Do tell me, how did you sleep?
– Fine. I dreamt that I was Van Gogh.
– I didn’t sleep a wink. I was thinking of Anthony.

“I am immensely proud of the way Anthony’s Death refers to my work.” Slavoj Žižek

Two men, stuck in a clearing out of Dante or Heidegger, smugly indulge in the pleasures of speech and are faced with trauma, fantasy, the death drive, repetition compulsion, their fear of woman and their omnipresent narcissism – with intermediate stops at the Epistles of St Paul, the seminars of Jacques Lacan and the hit songs by Ruslana and Eleni Dimou. Their obsessional, unstoppable discourse is shot through with insistent questions: Does Woman exist, or not? Why is “fox” written with a lowercase initial in Greek, though with an uppercase initial in German? And most of all: Why did we cry so hard when Anthony, Candy’s blond boyfriend, fell from his horse at the end of that fatal episode in the mid-80s?

Anthony’s Death, a “conceptual chamber opera”, an unholy crossbreed of “high” and “low” culture and, an oblique satire of the fashion for the neo-baroque, sets out to articulate the insecurities and anxieties of a generation raised on VHS, Dynasty and Chornobyl, and eternally confronted with the spectre of an impending (financial, ecological, health-related, geopolitical…) catastrophe that haunts our dreams – until the inevitable, self-destructive finale: “We have all fantasised our own funerals.”

Kharálampos Goyós has fashioned an extremely personal work. “Yannis Filias and I”, he said, “conceived Anthony’s Death during the afterglow period of the victorious Euro tournament, the Olympics and Eurovision Song Contest of 2004-05, at a time when suburban maisonettes were rising in Athens, public opinion dictated that Greece was at the apex of its glory and the future was bright. We were then two young men who shared, apart from our operatic learning, the same sensitivity to the disquieting undertow of the era. So, one night, we decided to creatively unload our uneasiness on a cartoon idol of our childhood and return to the trauma that had marked our generation twenty years earlier… In the mid-1980s, a Japanese anime soap opera called Candy Candy afforded today's fortysomethings an unforgettable event. At the end of the twenty-fourth episode, Candy's blond boyfriend fell from his horse during the foxhunt and was instantly killed, plunging the heroine in gloom and us young, privileged viewers, in bewilderment: Can life indeed be so cruel, so unjust? Can it strike so abruptly? Is nothing we love secure? The trauma of Anthony’s death and Candy’s devastating lament over his fallen body haunted our generation’s imaginary, and is still often discussed as the ancestral matrix of whatever psychic wounds or insecurities torment us.”

Dimitris Karantzas, in his first collaboration with the GNO Alternative Stage, spoke about “the attachment of two boys to the 80s, Candy Candy and the fall of Anthony – the blond young boyfriend who died falling ingloriously from his horse. His fall defined them forever. In an artificial garden in full bloom, during the foxhunt, the two friends are writing a work about this fall and come to terms with the hunt for the fox, the hunt for inspiration, the hunt for the Woman (with a capital ‘W’), the hunt for ideas. A journey towards sexuality, towards the past that defines the present, towards the woman that lies inside us and the negation of growing up. The clearing as a site of freedom, where the two friends will contact the existential void, their deep love, the eroticism between them and an innocence they want to keep alive at all costs. Amid gunshots, galloping, transformations and picnics among the flowers.”

The set was designed by Artemis Flessa, the costumes by Ioanna Tsami and the lighting by Alekos Anastasiou.

The opera’s taxing roles will be sung by leading vocalists Georgios Iatrou, Vassilis Kavayas and Marissia Papalexiou

The 7-member instrumental ensemble is made up of the musicians Alexandros Drymonitis (electric guitar), Iason Marmaras (harpsichord, synthesizer), Vasilis Soukas, Vanessa Athanasiou (violins), Marios Dapergolas (viola), Angelos Liakakis (cello), Yorgos Arnis (double bass).

In parallel – Symposium

Anthony at the Clearing: Opera’s Death Drive
25, 26 November 2022
Starts at 17.30
Greek National Opera Alternative Stage
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center

Participants: Mauro Fosco Bertola, Costis Demertzis, Akis Gavriilidis, Ludovica Grassi, Daniel Röhe, Kostis Stafylakis, Nicholas Till, Petros Vouvaris

Keynote speaker: Joan Copjec

Symposium organiser: Paris Konstantinidis

The symposium Anthony at the Clearing: Opera’s Death Drive, held concurrently with the performances of Anthony’s Death, will feature a keynote speech by the eminent American philosopher Joan Copjec (Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, USA) as well as papers on issues raised by the opera by important representatives of the fields of musicology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultural studies from Greece and abroad. The symposium is organised by the musicologist Paris Konstantinidis.

More info here.