The big drums growl darkly, grow menacingly louder, until they unleash a hurricane with furious beats.

As this swelling repeats, the stage curtain slowly rises.

The sight of the scene is just as unsettling as the spooky prologue: a huge prow of a ship that has run aground can be seen, its interior long since overgrown by nature.

The set designer Rifail Ajdarpasic covers the ground with a desolate desert of stones and gravel, a few dry branches lie around, on the left there is a decaying door leaf, on the right a tubular steel bed sinks into the rubble, and in the background a murky pool shimmers.

It's an uninviting morning for the newly born Johannes, whose father, the nervously babbled fisherman Olai (Cornelius Obonya), stumbles excitedly over the scree instead of helping the midwife.

Nothing changes in the scenario when in the second part of Georg Friedrich Haas' "Morgen und Abend" Johannes, who has meanwhile aged, gradually slides towards his death and imagines that the world around him is shining in golden splendour.

After all, the ship's bow, which is otherwise always foggy or alienated by projections, lies in a clear light in the finale, which reveals to Johannes the bitter realization that the Norwegian poet Jon Fosse conveys in his brilliant libretto: that he will go back "where he came from / from nothing to nothing".

Significantly, it is again not a capital city stage that brings an opera by Haas to its Austrian premiere.

The Graz Opera, under the direction of the designated director of the Dresden Semperoper Nora Schmid, has been on the lookout for rarities such as Jaromir Weinberger's revue-like fairy tale "Schwanda, the Bagpiper" from 1927, is opening the door to the present with this production.

This opening grants a relentless view of our pandemic-ridden and war-threatening world, which is now closer to the abyss than ever before, not least because of the climate crisis.

Death is at the center of his work

Director Immo Karaman, who coherently staged Haas' "Coma" in Klagenfurt in 2019, adds clever ideas to the end-time scenario.

Symbolically, father Olai lays the newly born infant Johannes in the same bed in which he will later become delirious as he has aged.

The fact that he takes up the same profession as a fisherman as his father also fits into this picture.

And even more so the metaphor of the boat that takes him on the last journey as in the Greek myth.

Karaman characterizes this kind of in-between world of those who are not yet dead, but also no longer alive, with additional figures: Johannes sees his dead friend Peter (Matthias Koziorowski) and his wife Erna (Christina Baader), who also died, with a broken eye in multiple forms at different ages .

The home of the fisherman appears just as abstract:

All of Georg Friedrich Haas' operas are actually characterized by darkness and the cloud of mystery.

Recently, due to the composer's near-death experience, death has increasingly become the focus of his work.

As in "Thomas" (2013) and "Koma" (2016), it is the process of dying itself that fascinates Haas in "Morgen und Abend".

This also distinguishes his dozing characters from the usual stage deaths in traditional operas.

The tried and tested means for him to symbolize this comatose state musically is microtonality.

Unlike in the music theaters mentioned, Haas does not write any microtonal scales in the score for the orchestra in "Morgen und Abend", but achieves iridescent overtone vibrations through the appropriate layering of different tonal intervals or chords,

which are often reinforced from the off by the sound-oriented choir (rehearsal: Bernhard Schneider).

The most haunting are the spherical sounds at Johannes' death, when the music rotates in on itself through shrill, whirring percussion effects and high harmonics of the strings - only to culminate in a simple a cappella lament at Johannes' funeral by his daughter Signe.

Roland Kluttig, the new General Music Director of Graz, and the Graz Philharmonic Orchestra, which he carefully conducted, made a significant contribution to the success of this impressive evening.

With Kluttig, Nora Schmid brought a proven connoisseur of new music to the house.

It is to be hoped that he will remain in Graz despite the departure of the artistic director.

Because with this season, the Graz Opera is definitely building on the legendary era of Gerhard Brunner.

Which of course is also thanks to the in-house ensemble that Schmid has been carefully building up since 2015.

Above all the baritone Markus Butter, who sings Johannes with great clarity, but always mindful of the vibrating uncertainty of his character.

Cathrin Lange completes the strong vocal impression with her bright, high-pitched soprano in the dual role of midwife and signe.