About the work
"Monster's Paradise" is a political grotesque conceived as a "Grand Guignol Opéra" by the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, to a libretto by Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek after an idea by the composer. It was premiered in February 2026 at the Hamburg State Opera (Hamburgische Staatsoper), directed by Tobias Kratzer and conducted by Titus Engel. It marks the first operatic collaboration between the two Austrian artists in 23 years – following "Bählamms Fest" (1999) and "Lost Highway" (2003), based on David Lynch's film. The work fuses biting contemporary satire with the lurid aesthetics of historical Grand Guignol theatre.
Plot
As avatars of themselves, Neuwirth and Jelinek dispatch two "vampirines" on a journey around the world to observe the decline of humanity. As ecological crises throw the planet ever further off balance, a king-president modelled on Donald Trump threatens a world spinning out of control. Through a sequence of grotesquely exaggerated episodes the opera stages the disintegration of society, politics and nature – a world-theatre of the monstrous in which the true monster is the condition of the present itself. Jelinek's powerfully verbal, multilayered textual surfaces meet Neuwirth's dense, cross-media sonic dramaturgy.
Cultural significance
The alliance of Olga Neuwirth – one of the most significant living composers internationally – and Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek ranks among the most prominent author partnerships in contemporary music theatre; their reunion after more than two decades made the premiere one of the most-watched events of the 2025/26 season. The work exemplifies Neuwirth's politically committed, socially critical music theatre, which addresses present-day crises – climate, authoritarianism, media culture – in radical aesthetic form. By reaching back to the Grand Guignol, the grotesque, blood-soaked horror theatre of the early twentieth century, the opera updates a popular theatrical tradition for the present, and was intensely debated by critics.