About the work
"Three Sisters" is an opera by Péter Eötvös after Anton Chekhov's play of the same name; Eötvös wrote the Russian-language libretto together with Claus H. Henneberg, translated by Krzysztof Wiernicki. Kent Nagano conducted the premiere on 13 March 1998 at the Opéra de Lyon, staged by the Japanese choreographer Ushio Amagatsu.
Plot
The opera follows the siblings Olga, Masha, Irina, and Andrei, who have lived in a Russian provincial town for eleven years and long to return to Moscow. A prologue and three sequences retell the same events from shifting perspectives, converging on Masha's affair with Vershinin and the fatal duel between Tuzenbach and Solyony that shatters Irina's hopes.
Cultural significance
Eötvös cast all the female roles with countertenors and drew on Japanese Kabuki theatre to create distance from the realistic source material. The German press named "Three Sisters" the most important new work of 1998; it has since been staged in Vienna, Frankfurt, and Buenos Aires, among other houses.