Alone Together

In the same way that filmmakers of the French new wave turned to pulp detective novels as the raw material for groundbreaking cinematic explorations, Chaya Czernowin’s new opera Heart Chamber -a commission from the Deutsche Oper, where it recently had its world première- bore a strong structural resemblance to a romantic drama, the kind of formulaic prestige picture for which actors and actresses often win awards. Yet Ms Czernowin’s elusive text and polystylistic score made few concessions to anything as obvious as a story. If Claus Guth’s elegant staging managed to anchor the opera in just enough narrative reference points to suggest a conventional emotional arc hidden among the fragments, it was Ms Czernowin’s daring musical complexity and her capacity for spellbinding moments of abstraction that made Heart Chamber a singular…