Opera from Anno Schreier inspired by the book of José Saramago, Libretto by Kerstin Maria Pöhler
at the Opera Zurich, Switzerland


“In the ‘City of the Blind’” – as Anno Schreier explains – “we recount a parable about how people coexist under extreme conditions, under the influence of an unforeseen catastrophe – similarly to what we often hear and read in the news. Yet in this case people are not under the threat of war, natural catastrophe or nuclear disaster. Here, the catastrophe is within the people themselves: the ability to see has been taken from them. They look into a blinding whiteness and are completely at the mercy of each other and their environment. It is like an experimental arrangement: crowded together in an isolation camp by order of the state and left to their own devices, the blind form a sort of miniature society, which in the struggle for survival ultimately develops into a tyranny. Only one woman among the blind can still see: the wife of an eye specialist who wants to stay with her blind husband. She could be a heroine and finally kills the man she believes to be the tyrant, but is left alone with her guilt and the memories of what she alone has had to see. In this experimental arrangement, all human emotions, modes of behaviour and characteristics – good and bad – appear as if under a monstrous magnifying glass."