missing in cantu (your palaces are empty)

The search for the legendary Eldorado and the allure of gold serve as the starting point for the sweltering, surreal operatic epic that Innsbruck-based composer Johannes Maria Staud (*1974) and the successful Upper Austrian playwright Thomas Köck (*1986) have undertaken for their first collaboration. The basis of the material—which contrasts the subjugation of the American continent through European colonization with the current disintegration of American society—is Köck’s play *Your Palaces Are Empty (All We Ever Wanted)*. Three plotlines intertwine within it: a group of Spanish conquistadors navigating the Amazon in search of the City of Gold, sequences from a contemporary suburban settlement of the crumbling middle class, and the flashback of a seer wandering through the dystopian remnants of a former center of power.

The dynamics that Staud—who received the Austrian Art Prize for Music in 2022—translates into sound are intoxicating: the intoxication of gold, blood, and drugs symbolize boundary crossings and driving forces that make it impossible to grasp reality. The result, in the composer’s words , is “a dazzling, complex whole that pushes traditional categories such as aria, recitative, ensemble scene, or choral passage into the background in favor of a multi-layered, hybrid scene structure.” With the Austrian premiere of missing in cantu, an opera by Staud is on the TLT’s program for the first time, staged by Bettina Bruinier, the theater’s co-director with extensive opera experience.