About the work
Du Yun's „Angel's Bone" was premiered in New York in 2016 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2017, to a libretto by Royce Vavrek. The opera is a dark parable about modern human trafficking. Its music mixes punk, cabaret, electronica and classical singing into a drastic, harrowing sound world.
Plot
An ordinary, financially pressed couple — Mr and Mrs X.E. — one day find two injured angels who have fallen into their garden. At first they nurse the creatures back to health. But soon they realise what power these heavenly beings place in their hands: they clip the angels' wings, lock them up and begin to exploit them and sell them to strangers. What began as a miracle becomes a commodity; the angels are robbed of their dignity and their freedom. The opera uses the image of the fallen, exploited angels as an allegory of forced exploitation and human trafficking, posing the question of guilt, complicity and the loss of innocence in a commodified world.
Cultural significance
„Angel's Bone" is among the most important American operas of recent years and became internationally known through the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Du Yun's radical mixture of styles and the explosive theme of human trafficking made the work a much-discussed example of a politically engaged, genre-crossing music theatre of the present.