“If you must, you must, he says. Perhaps that’s how it is, she says.” Commissioned by the Berlin Staatsoper and based on the first novella in Jon Fosse’s Trilogy, the piece is an “opera ballad, whose protagonists are two teenagers who expect a child,” said Péter Eötvös. “But they have nothing and their future is hopeless, while they cannot expect help from the adults around them. Whenever the boy finds there is no other way he can improve the position of the girl and the future child, he makes someone who has shunned them disappear. He commits three murders and is eventually hanged. And here comes the main question of the opera: can a teenage boy kill those who deny them help in order to save his family?”