“For two hundred years the Europeans have been sending us their operas. Now I’m sending them back.” Europera 1–5 is a cycle of five self-contained productions, each an opera-collage pieced together with a different method, with a great deal of liberty accorded to the performers. John Cage wrote the last piece at the very end of his life, in 1991. Europera 5 was created for two singers, a pianist, and different sound reproduction devices. Each singer chooses five arias from the basic repertoire of opera, while the pianist plays different operatic arrangements.

The two singers, Katalin Károlyi and Lilla Horti, feel at home in different periods, and so the audience may well hear a cross-section of the genre’s output that spans four centuries of its history.