The Space of Sound, the Space of History. Mirosław Bałka and Paweł Mykietyn

In their 2002 book Opera's Second Death, Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek describe Opera as “the supporting fantasy of the absolute monarchy and then the foundational myth of the 'nation-state'”. However, there are, it seems, several signs that contradict this interpretation. These include two operas by the Polish musician Andrzej Mykietyn, with stage design by the well-known artist Miroslaw Balka. Based on two canonical national operas, Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz (1834) and Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (1924), they strip away any national and identity aspects. Balka's design, in particular, propose, in a non-didactic way, traumatic images that are already well established and codified in the European collective memory and invent, in the fleeting time of the performance, a democratic and open structure, in which the memory of the defeated also participates.