Johannes Kreidler has written an opera. This is, alongside Alexander Schubert making Ensemble Intercontemporain sync up to strobe lights and Jennifer Walshe making Lucas Fels do a silly dance, a symptom of the inevitable institutionalisation of former iconoclasts who less than half a decade ago were still being championed as figures who, in Michael Rebhahn's polemic terms, ‘resigned from New Music’. But Kreidler does not seem to feel threatened by this. Indeed, his willingness to adopt the official genre of opera without qualification – in contrast to Ferneyhough's ‘thought opera’, Lachenmann's ‘musik mit Bildern’, and the more common designations of ‘music theatre’ or ‘musical action’ – signifies just how comfortable he is with his position as an established composer.