Do go read this NYTimes piece on a new opera –

With George Tsypin’s translucent décor suggesting a Balkan or Middle Eastern village, Mr. Sellars’s fluent direction helps the opera’s four characters to occupy the Bastille Opera’s large stage. Divided into seven tableaus, the opera opens with Adriana (the Irish mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon) rebuffing the advances of a drunken villager, Tsargo (the Danish bass Stephen Milling).

In the second tableau, Tsargo returns as a soldier and, when Adriana again rejects him, he bursts into her home and rapes her. In the third scene, with Adriana now pregnant, Refka (the Norwegian soprano Solveig Kringelborn) chastises her for bearing the son of a monster. But Adriana responds: "It is not his child, Rekfa, it is mine."

The remaining four tableaus take place 17 years later, when Yonas (the Canadian tenor Gordon Gietz) sets out to kill his father. "If he must kill him, he will kill him," Adriana responds with resignation.

But this is where the opera turns from despair to hope.

Yonas cannot bring himself to kill Tsargo, now old and blind. Feeling he has betrayed his mother, he begs her forgiveness. But now, at last, Adriana is sure that her blood flows through Yonas’s veins. "This man deserved to die, my son, but you did not deserve to kill," she says. And taking her son in her arms, she concludes: "We are not avenged, Yonas, but we are saved."