In Walser’s world, nothing is quite what it seems. Or rather, things often are two things at once: sleep can represent both ignorance and enlightenment; repetition can feel nightmarish or soothing. Our protagonist Thorn Rose — a rendering of Dornröschen, the Brothers Grimm’s name for “Sleeping Beauty” — is named in honor of such opposites existing side-by-side. Is this paradoxical world a puzzle to solve, a trap to escape, or simply a mystery to inhabit? The music — shot through with obsessive repetition, harmonic cycles, rhythmic labyrinths, and recurring motifs — asks similar questions. A counterpoint of musical styles, including evocations of the Medieval, the Baroque, the Classical, the 19th century, and the Minimalist, move forward and backward through time, accompanying the journey of our palace community — who at any moment might fall asleep for a century. These styles often combine in unusual ways, where disparate musical traditions might synthesize for a moment. Throughout the piece, more literal sounds of time passing are evoked — clocks, watch gears, bells, alarms, and skipping record players. This layer of the music is trying to wake the audience up while another vein — full of yawning motifs and lullaby-esque repetitions — is trying to lull. Meanwhile, the choral part often fractures the text into a web of sound, as if an idea can become a sonic space that we inhabit. All this is done in an attempt to realize Walser’s philosophically layered, unsettling, enchanted, eerie, childlike, and fascinatingly cryptic world onstage and in time.

Gregory Spears' new opera Sleepers Awake has its world premiere at the Academy of Music April 22-26.