Nachiketa is a new Opera; its librettist is well-known Chilean-writer-in-exile, Ariel Dorfman.
Whenever, a writer takes on a "foreign" subject matter, I'm always intrigued, primarily because that's a challenge that's worth taking on. In this sense, an apt predecessor of Dorfman's Nachiketa would be Peter Brooks' Mahabharata.
Nachiketa's story is borrowed from the ancient Hindu text of the Upanishads and modernized:
A little boy goes to Death and asks Death three things: “What is love?” And Death takes him on a trip to India to the child prostitute who wants to kill her own baby. “What is reconciliation?” And Death takes him to Africa to the child soldier who has gouged out the eyes of his best friend and killed his own parents. “What comes after death?” And then Death takes him to Chile or Argentina, where there are two orphans who don’t know whether their parents are alive or dead.
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