Georg Friedrich Haas’s opera Koma, which received its world premiere in Schwetzingen in 2016, explores the condition of a patient caught between life and death. Michaela has suffered a traumatic brain injury and remains in a vegetative state. She is here – and at the same time unbelievably far away, trapped in a limbo of light and darkness. Through Haas’s evocative music, composed to a libretto by Händl Klaus, this shadowland is made palpable. More than half the scenes depicting Michaela’s dream state through sound are played in absolute darkness. The hospital staff go about their daily business in a kind of twilight, while Michaela’s relatives are confronted with another shadowland: the horrors of memory.