Genesis Opera Project 1

Rut Blees Luxemburg (born 1967 in Germany) is an artist who makes large-scale photographic works, which illuminate the poetics of space. Her work is exhibited internationally.

Filippo Del Corno was born in Milan in 1970. He studied composition at the Conservatorio "G. Verdi" with Danilo Lorenzini and Azio Corghi.

Evoking such responses from critics as "ethereal," "mesmerizing," "creepy," "toothy," "perfect," and "just plain absolutely beautiful," Asplund has performed and conducted his music in jazz, rock, and classical venues in the United States and Canada. He has also made numerous live radio and festival appearances.

Isidora Žebeljan was born in 1967, in Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia. Her father was a journalist; her mother, a professor of literature and of the Serbian language. She started studying piano and music at the age of five and attended a high school for music in Belgrade where she won first prize in the piano and solfeggio competitions.

The libretto revolves around the elusive character of Arthur Stace - a reformed alcoholic and religious ratbag/visionary who wandered the nocturnal streets of Sydney through the forties, fifties and sixties mysteriously writing the single word "Eternity" in a distinctive copperplate hand.

Sirius on Earth is a madcap comic opera set in an occidental metropolis, not so far into the future. Its inhabitants love, talk, and scheme against a backdrop of an oppressive and manic dictatorship; this is a world where singing the wrong song at the wrong time can deliver you to the Penultimate Punishment.

A clearing in a blasted wasteland. A mysterious prophet, Thwaite, and his six disparate followers arrive and build an improvised hut from available detritus. They forage for food and have a meal. The following day, after settling down to theological discussion, Blane (a mischievous interloper) provokes a debate about which of them is in fact this shadowy Thwaite whom they have never met.

A TV reporter is interviewing a young girl who is collecting signatures from commuters. The reporter also talks to a city councillor who highhandedly declares the authority's determination to cut down the cherry trees. The young girl and the councillor argue.

A gravedigger works at a German cemetery, burning the corpses of the German nobility. His is a strange, solitary, subversive existence; musing on the wreckage of his life, substituting the ashes of illegal immigrants for the noblemen in the grand graves, and using the ashes of the privileged in his garden for flowers.

Liebeslied/My Suicides is the product of an unusual collaboration between an artist, a writer, and a composer to create a different kind of opera. In 1999 the acclaimed artist Rut Blees Luxemburg created a photographic series that represents a celebration of the lovepoem/lovesong in the modern city.