Die Gespenstersonate

A young student who talks to the dead; an old man who tricks his fellow men into giving him help; a colonel whose wife has been living mummy-like in a closet for years and thinks she is a parrot; and the beautiful but sickly daughter. They all come together in a once stately house for a ghostly dinner. What begins as a bizarre social gathering quickly turns into a savage settling of debts, in which the murky depths and hidden secrets of all those involved gradually come to light. For his chamber opera Die Gespenstersonate, which premiered in Berlin in 1984, composer Aribert Reimann adapted The Ghost Sonata by Swedish dramatist August Strindberg to create this subtle and intelligent dissection of society, which builds on the great success of his literary operas Lear and Melusine.