During the Sacrum Profanum Festival, we would like to invite you to an exceptional event – the première of the opera ahat ilī – sister of gods, featuring a libretto written by Olga Tokarczuk, and the music composed by Aleksander Nowak. Apart from two performances directed by Pia Partum, the programme also features a meeting with the authors of this extraordinary piece. In a discussion led by Michał Nogaś, Olga Tokarczuk, Pia Partum and Aleksander Nowak will talk about what happened behind the scenes of this unusual performance.

Ahat ilī – sister of gods is a piece written and composed on the basis of Tokarczuk’s novel Anna In Tombs of the World. This is the first opera based on Tokarczuk’s prose, but certainly not the first adaptation – in the past, we saw Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor, based on the book Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead. However, transforming the novel’s text into a libretto is a completely different challenge. “Here, completely different means are used to communicate ordinary content. Therefore, I was preparing for it, reading the librettos of various operas, I watched how it’s all done, I started to travel to watch various operas and finally – I dared. Frankly, after that, it was quite a pleasurable work. It was like taking the essence out of the whole novel with hundreds of pages, or rather forgetting how it was written and telling it anew once again in short, concise words,” Olga Tokarczuk explains.

The libretto was written in Polish, but the staged work will be translated into English, Accadian, Latin, Old Greek, Slavic and Aztec.

Olga Tokarczuk explains this idea. “It so happened that a few years ago I went to Poznań to see the performance of Space Opera, the libretto was written by my good friend, the great Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, and the music was composed by Aleksander Nowak. To be honest, I was fascinated by what they did, how the epic novelist changed his writing and wrote a text that was completely out of this world, and which, in addition, lent itself well to the form of an opera – a special, multidimensional form, allowing itself for multi-faceted pathos in all the levels of communication. In my opinion, this was very successful. I talked to Alek Nowak about this opera somewhere behind the scenes and that was my idea at the time, I thought there was one work I had written back in the day and it was Anna In Tombs of the World. I always believed that the story would perfectly lend itself to a more dignified form of expression and that the novel was not the kind of a form in which the story should be told – that an opera with all its possibilities would be the best. So I pitched the idea to him. I sent him a book and he got excited; he just loved the idea. After that... I don't really know how it happened that KFO became interested in it. I think that this was because of Alek Nowak, who is a really great composer, a great erudite, a man who also brought a lot of his ideas to this idea and enriched what I had in mind at the beginning. This work has a ton of his energy. I am not even talking about music, but about the ways of showing and telling the story.”

The full text of the libretto and the interview with the author can be read in the latest issue of Czas literatury.