6 composers, 3 singers, 3 instrumentalists, and 1 conductor: Out at S.E.A. is a joint project supervised by Péter Eötvös, Luca Francesconi and Balázs Horváth and supported by the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation and the Budapest Music Center. After performances in Budapest and Milan the French premiere takes places at IRCAM in Paris on July 9.

Out at S.E.A came into being as the result of a unique process, a combination of a composition workshop, a competition for composers, and a complex final phase of assembling the parts and creating and rehearsing the final result, a chamber opera. Or, rather, a double chamber opera, as the same libretto is set to music in two independent versions.

The process started with a four-day chamber opera workshop in April 2013, supervised and guided by Péter Eötvös, Luca Francesconi, and Balázs Horváth. Here the 37 participants reviewed and discussed the special opportunities of the libretto by András Almási-Tóth, based on Sławomir Mrożek’s play Out at S.E.A. (Someone Eats All), and the questions of the dramaturgy and the compositional technique. The workshop was followed by the individual creative process, lasting for several months. After this six composers were selected to compose the music for one of the characters.

The philosophy behind this unique procedure is Péter Eötvös’s observation that in all known operas one single composer writes the material for every character, so they have one hallmark. But what happens if the composer gives up his leading role? Three completely different characters meet in the story; so Péter Eötvös’s answer was that “each character should be composed by a different composer.”


What actually is Sławomir Mrożek’s one-act absurd drama all about? It is an embittered and disillusioned parable about issues of alienation, abuse of power, conformity, and the limits of freedom; about the possibilities of manipulation and the loss of belief in democracy. This is all packed into a grotesque but simple situation: three men in a boat have to decide which one of them should be eaten by the other two for survival. The three characters exemplify three types of people in society: the clever Manipulator, the cynical Conformist, and the eternal Victim.

It may not be a pure coincidence that five of the selected composers, like Sławomir Mrożek and Péter Eötvös themselves, came from countries with limited democratic traditions: Máté Gergely Balogh and Samu Gryllus are Hungarian, Diana Soh is from Singapore, Koka Nikoladze from Georgia, and Mariana Ungureanu from Moldavia, while the sixth composer, Christian Flury grew up in Austria. The invited conductor of the chamber opera is the Taiwanese Lin Liao, and the viola, cello, and clarinet parts are being played by Hungarian and Romanian artists.

The premiere of Out at S.E.A. took place in the Budapest Music Center on December 19, 2013, and the first production of its tour within the framework of the Ulysses Network was in Milan on February 26, 2014. The next event will be a performance at IRCAM in Paris on July 9, and there will be two more productions, one in Brussels (Flagey) and one in Mazsalaca, Latvia (International Workshop for Young Composers).