Word: aniara
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...radiation apparatus that powered the electronic brain. As presented in Stockholm's Royal Opera House last week, this kind of interstellar meller was meant not for science-fiction escapists but for devotees of avant-garde music. Occasion: the premiere of Swedish Composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl's Aniara, widely hailed as the first operatic excursion into the world of outer space...
Based on a "space cycle" by Swedish Poet Harry Martinson, Aniara proved to be a lengthy allegory about man's journey through life "in the spiritual void" that sucks him at last to his own destruction. The curtain rises on the interior of a spaceship dominated by the towering electronic brain, a mechanism so advanced that it is nearly human. Ranged in front of it as ghostlike silhouettes, the passengers chant a lament for the planet Doris (actually the Earth) they just left behind...
...spaceship Aniara is one of several making the milk run between Doris and Mars, bearing loads of earthlings in flight from the threat of atomic destruction. A day's flight from Mars, Aniara's steering mechanism is jammed, and the ship wanders haphazardly out of the solar system ("We are always en route to infinity," sings the chief engineer); at the same time, the electronic brain reports the destruction of the planet Doris...
Mankind's Epitaph. From then on, the opera details the moral and physical collapse of Aniara's 8,000 travelers. The passengers seek to distract themselves, turning first to jitterbugging (led by a party girl named Daisi Doody), later to an atavistic sex cult called "Yurg," involving lascivious dances in a hall of mirrors. The chief engineer dies, and during a gaudy celebration is fired in a coffin to become a sun satellite. After 24 years of space travel, the remaining passengers die, aware too late that in the destruction of his home planet man had lost...
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