In April 2018, Angelos Triantafyllou suggested that I write the libretto for an opera themed around the death of the elderly from loneliness: a topic that had been lingering in the back of his mind for years and was reignited by a text regarding solitary deaths in Japan.

I immediately accepted, not because I was unaware of the difficulty – the deadlock, almost – of a Greek libretto with death at its center, but rather, precisely because of the paralyzing effect such an idea had on me. At that time, I happened to be facing that indistinct shadow of time that resembles the end of an era, the shadow that once you cross it, all that is familiar suddenly ceases to be familiar and takes on a blurry, unsettling outline.