One hundred years ago Maurice Maeterlinck received the Nobel Prize for literature, the only Belgian ever to have done so. A suitable opportunity to bring the expressive sound idiom of the composer Dirk D'Ase face to face with the stream of images produced by the symbolist director Stef Lernous in a new opera based on Maeterlinck's work. Using extracts from the work of Belgium's best-known author, Lernous has constructed an odd and mysterious fairytale around man's fundamental fears and fantasies. Lernous makes grateful use of Maeterlinck's rich symbolically-charged writing to evoke an atmosphere in which the 'intruder' confronts us with our own dark depths.
Dirk D'Ase is a Flemish composer who has for years operated from a base in Vienna and already has several operas to his name. In 1993 he wrote the Congo opera 'Red Rubber' for deSingel. He was commissioned to do so by the Flanders Opera and deSingel, after Luc Brewaeys had been unable to carry it out. The director and author Stef Lernous has since 1999 been one of the driving forces behind the Mechelen theatre collective Abattoir Fermé. 'L'Intruse' is the first opera he has directed.