Colin delights his friends with dishes prepared by his cook Nicolas, invents a _pianocktail_ to match drinks to melodies, and dreams of great love. When Chloé enters his life, happiness seems complete. But a sinister water lily slowly begins to grow in the young woman’s lung.
Boris Vian wrote _The Foam of Days_ in just a few weeks, at the age of twenty-six. Behind the novel’s enigmatic and luminous title, published in post-war Paris, lies an ambiguous tale. Infused with surreal poetry—where mice speak and lovers hide within a pink cloud—the whimsical story gradually transforms into a drama about the fleeting and elusive nature of happiness.
The book, which became a cult classic in the 1960s, has been adapted many times for the stage and screen, and later as an opera by Soviet composer Edison Denisov. Fascinated by French culture and Western European music, Denisov found in the narrative freedom of _The Foam of Days_ fertile ground to expand his musical language beyond the strictures of Socialist Realism that prevailed behind the Iron Curtain. A proponent of polystylism, he weaves together jazz-inflected motifs (recalling Duke Ellington), large-scale Russian-inspired liturgical choral writing, references to Wagner’s _Tristan and Isolde_, and an homage to the sound of Orthodox bells.
A composer himself, a specialist in contemporary repertoire, and deeply attuned to the fusion of musical languages, Lebanese-Polish conductor Bassem Akiki embraces this stylistic diversity with agility. He brings a fresh breath to this lyric drama, which has not been staged in France since its premiere in 1986. In the theatre world, Franco-Polish director Anna Smolar is known for a universe that blends poetry, humour and depth. For her operatic debut, she chooses to place Chloé at the centre of the narrative. No longer confined to the role of a fantasy figure whose sole purpose is to awaken desire and then die, Chloé becomes here a sincere and fully embodied narrator. She gives voice not only to the complexity of illness, but also to the freedom to live—and to die—according to one’s own rules.