On 1 February 2026, the Hamburg State Opera presents the world premiere of Monster’s Paradise, a new music-theatre work by Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek. The production marks the first newly realised collaboration between the two artists in more than twenty years, following earlier landmark works such as Bählamms Fest and Lost Highway.
Neuwirth, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music theatre, is known for works that combine instrumental writing with electronics, video, and filmic thinking, often addressing questions of identity, power, and representation. Jelinek, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, has long challenged political language and patriarchal structures through a body of work that spans theatre, prose, and essays. Their reunion for Monster’s Paradise brings together two artistic trajectories that have frequently intersected—if not always on stage.
A long-delayed collaboration
Although Neuwirth and Jelinek have collaborated in various forms over the decades, Monster’s Paradise is their first jointly realised music-theatre project since the early 2000s. Several planned works were abandoned along the way, despite concrete commitments from institutions—an experience both artists address openly in interviews accompanying the premiere.
Commissioned by the Hamburg State Opera and co-produced with the Zurich Opera House and the Opera Graz, Monster’s Paradise is presented as a Grand Guignol Opéra: a term that signals exaggeration, grotesque imagery, and dark humour rather than adherence to traditional operatic form. The production is directed by Tobias Kratzer, with Titus Engel conducting the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg.
Monsters, power, and spectatorship
The work unfolds across five scenes and centres on two figures, Vampi and Bampi, described as “vampirettes”, who observe a world approaching collapse. From a prologue set above humanity, they descend into a landscape shaped by political power, mass movements, war, and ecological catastrophe.
At the centre of this world stands a King-President, surrounded by loyal aides and driven by the rituals of power. Opposing him—and eventually replacing him—is Gorgonzilla, a monster created by a nuclear disaster and hailed as a possible saviour. Yet the overthrow of the King-President does not restore order. The destruction has already gone too far, and even the monster proves incapable of reversing it. The final image offers no resolution: Vampi and Bampi drift away on a raft, accompanied by a piano that continues to play.
Voices from the programme booklet
Extensive interviews with both artists, published on the opera’s official website and in the programme booklet, provide insight into the thinking behind the work.
In conversation with Kerstin Schüssler-Bach, Neuwirth traces the origins of Monster’s Paradise back to an unrealised project from 2011, as well as to ideas already present in her opera Orlando. She describes her long-standing engagement with monsters, animation, science fiction, and Japanese theatre—interests that inform both the visual imagination and the sonic world of the piece. Gorgonzilla’s electronically transformed voice, for instance, is designed to set the creature apart acoustically from the human realm, while ritual instruments such as Kagura bells carry symbolic weight.
A second interview, conducted by Christopher Warmuth, focuses on Jelinek’s perspective as a writer. She reflects on the limits of art as an agent of change, describing it instead as a means of provoking awareness—often through laughter that turns uneasy. The vampirettes, she explains, function as observers who move through systems of power without belonging to them, present and absent at the same time.
A hybrid form for the present moment
Rather than positioning itself as an opera in the traditional sense, Monster’s Paradise embraces hybridity. Singers share roles with actors; live electronics, video, electric guitar, and detuned pianos coexist with choral writing and ensemble scenes that occasionally allude to operatic convention—only to destabilise it.
Running in Hamburg through 19 February 2026, the production concludes with a final performance followed by a public discussion with members of the creative team. Monster’s Paradise does not offer solutions or redemption. Instead, it presents itself as a contemporary music-theatre statement shaped by observation, excess, and unease—inviting audiences to confront the present rather than escape from it.
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