In his "erotic mystery," Otto Borngräber imagines the first humans after their expulsion from paradise as a nuclear family thrown back on themselves: Chawa longs to be desired by her husband as before, but Adahm is preoccupied with the struggle for bare existence. His pubescent son Kajin roams the wilderness in search of a wife. His brother Chabel, in turn, seeks salvation in the worship of a creator god. When Kajin surprises his mother Chawa and Chabel in ecstatic union one night, he slays his brother. In a vision, he sees "the coming blood of coming humanity." Rudi Stephan's symphonically exhilarating music for this dramatic story is a discovery. The premiere took place in Frankfurt in 1920, five years after the composer's death in the First World War; to this day, his only opera is rarely performed. In Tobias Kratzer's production, which combines biblical events with a dystopian vision of the future, the work was named "Rediscovery of the Year" by the magazine Opernwelt in 2023.

Ian will sing the role of Chabel.