missing in cantu (your palaces are empty)

The search for the legendary Eldorado and the allure of gold serve as the starting point for this sweltering, surreal operatic epic, which the Innsbruck-based composer Johannes Maria Staud (*1974) and the successful Upper Austrian playwright Thomas Köck (*1986) have undertaken for their first collaboration.

A seer takes stock. He has foreseen all catastrophes but has been unable to avert any of them. In dialogue with Echo, his beloved, he faces the accusation that he missed his opportunities and remained silent about the horrors he had foreseen. From this image of a lost civilization, the piece unfolds as a retrospective in loops, breaks, repetitions, and images that increasingly shift within and over one another. The libretto interweaves several visual worlds from the history of Western civilization: the conquest of the American continent by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century, the current opioid crisis in American suburbs, dystopian scenes from a meat-processing plant that reveal the brutal excesses of turbo-capitalism, religious fanaticism, and the lust for power. In retrospect, following the collapse of the Western world, history appears as a spiral of a dynamic characterized by the intoxication of power, greed, subjugation, exploitation, and repression.

Staud, who received the Austrian Art Prize for Music in 2022 and the Tyrolean State Prize for Art in 2025, combines the libretto’s social analysis with an extremely inventive, stirring, and evocative musical language. While the title *missing in cantu* (“lost in song”) alludes to a secular “missa” (Mass) and the work can indeed be interpreted as a kind of requiem for the end of a civilization, Staud counters the flood of dystopian imagery with music that is exuberantly colorful, multifaceted, and downright vibrantly alive, blending the most diverse stylistic and material elements into a kaleidoscope.

With the Austrian premiere of *missing in cantu*, an opera by Staud appears on the TLT’s program for the first time, staged by Bettina Bruinier, the co-director of drama with extensive opera experience.