Blühen

A woman falls in love with a man young enough to be her son. She feels born again but just as her self-abandonment reaches its climax, is told that she's terminally ill. In his 1952/53 novel, The Deceived Woman, Thomas Mann depicted a paradoxical situation wrapped up in an alarming dialectic of life and death. Librettist Händl Klaus and composer Vito Žuraj call their opera in seven scenes ›Blühen‹, intensifying the idea even further, 70 years later, focussing on the protagonist, who they call Aurelia. Her relationship with her daughter Anna is even more ambivalent, with communication between the two women mirroring her own fears and insecurities. ›Blühen‹ is the second opera by the Slovenian composer Vito Žuraj.