"Irina can’t take any more, and bursts out: ‘Oh my God! Where has everything gone? I’ve forgotten everything.’ Then she adds abruptly: ‘We shall never go to Moscow.’ Neither the past with its memories nor the future with its hopes offer stability any longer. Time erodes and shrinks into the present — which is dominated by emptiness, dissatisfaction, pain and isolation. A condition that afflicts almost all the characters in Peter Eötvös’s opera Three Sisters (1998), based on Anton Chekhov’s play of the same name. The reactions are varied: repression or relativization, resignation or escape, and of course new dreams, hopes or even plans. Nevertheless, a seemingly unbridgeable gulf remains between today and the yearned-for tomorrow. Why do these individuals fail to get to Moscow, symbol of a different, better, more meaningful life? What inner or outer obstacles prevent them from doing so? That is a question we constantly find ourselves facing, which makes Chekhov’s and thus Eötvös’s characters seem very close to us. The question becomes all the more acute in the face of a sudden, raging fire — a catastrophe that demands concrete action, confronting us with destruction and suffering, with death and the sudden awareness that life could end faster than imagined." — Christian Arseni