Detlev Glanert's opera Solaris at the Festspielhaus in 2012

Detlev Glanert's opera Solaris, based on the celebrated science fiction novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem (published in Warsaw in 1961), will receive its world premiere at the Festspielhaus in Bregenz on 18 July 2012. 

Solaris is the story of the psychologist Kelvin, who is dispatched to a space station which is orbiting the distant planet Solaris and on which strange things have been happening. Right after arriving on board Solaris, Kelvin is warned by weird apparitions. Not long afterwards a very personal phantom appears in the form of his former lover, Harey, who killed herself at the age of nineteen. Now she accompanies him, reviving guilty memories of their love affair.

In Lem's Solaris, science fiction is not an end in itself but a vehicle for constructing a metaphor for the moral problem of guilt and memory and for our strategies of dealing with them. Lem presents possible reactions of people who are directly confronted by a quasi-physical manifestation of a memory: suppression by various technical means, resignation, and the acceptance of responsibility.

Detlev Glanert, born in Hamburg 1960, is regarded as a wizard of sound and a masterly orchestrator. He is admired above all for his orchestral works and operas. Glanert's first attempts at composition date from the age of twelve; later he studied composition under various teachers including Hans Werner Henze in Cologne. Glanert's works reflect his fascination with the Romantic tradition, viewed from a modern standpoint. Among his chief influences are Gustav Mahler with his emotionally charged view of the world, and Maurice Ravel with his artificial-sensuous sonic landscapes.