Journey to the Other Side

Jon Fosse’s brief novel Morning and Evening (Morgon og kveld, 2000) presents a stream-of-consciousness narration of an ordinary day in the life of an old fisherman named Johannes, a day in which (as Johannes himself continually notes) everything is the same but also somehow different; only after he encounters his best friend and his wife, both deceased, does he discover that he in fact is also dead and that his day has been spent in the transitional space between one life and the next. Much of the novel’s potency comes from the gentle pulse of its simple, inward language and the continual repetitions through which fragments of narrative are revealed at a measured pace. The task of translating it into a convincing drama, let alone an opera, would seem a treacherous endeavour.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the resulting opera achieves a very…