Jan Sandström, David Radok: Description of a Struggle

The opera Description of a Struggle was commissioned by the Gothenburg Opera, where it premiered in 2003.

The music was composed by Jan Sandström. The authors of the libretto, Josef Kroutvor and David Radok, drew in a loose manner on texts by Franz Kafka, mostly excerpts from his correspondence, aphorisms, the short story Description of a Struggle and the novel The Trial, as well as documents from the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company.

“It was not just a friendly gesture and a happy coincidence when David Radok asked me to collaborate on the libretto of a new opera. Franz Kafka was close to us and I even liked to use the quite transparent literary pseudonym Josef K. in the samizdat days,” recalls the co-author of the libretto, Josef Kroutvor.

The libretto did not set out to describe Franz Kafka’s life and did not attempt to cover all the important stages of his everyday or artistic life. Instead the intention of the production was to outline in operatic form the way Kafka depicted reality through so-called “magical materiality”. The situations were inspired by actual or possible events, allusions in texts, photographs, Kafka’s drawings and places he visited or could have visited.