Newly-written opera based on works by Franz Kafka. Music Jan Sandström.
Libretto by Josef Kroutvor and David Radok

The idea to write a Swedish opera based on Kafka was born during preparatory work for the Göteborg Opera’s guest performance of Il Viaggio a Reims in Prague. And now, 6 years later, the opera is finished and ready to be performed.

The story is not, unlike other scenic works about Franz Kafka, based on any of his literary characters. Instead we meet the central European writer together with different people from his immediate surroundings. Every word that is sung comes from Kafka’s pen, from letters, notes, diarys and novels. The libretto is written by the Czech writer Josef Kroutvor and by David Radok, the Göteborg Opera’s principal director, who will also direct this work.
Composer Jan Sandström is one of Swedish opera music’s most renowned contemporary composers, and last composed Macbeth² here at the Göteborg Opera.

The opera is filled with both comedy and tragedy and paints a burlesque and intense picture of the Czech master Franz Kafka, where the well-known melancholy is mixed with a great deal of humour. The writer Torgny Lindgren once said that “Kafka is the grandfather of Monty Python. They have the same sense of the absurd”.