The Killing Flower is an opera by Salvatore Sciarrino.  Both Italian and English versions exist and it was the latter that was given, in semistaged form, at Walter Hall as part of the Toronto New Music Festival last night.  It’s a very distinctive work and not easy to form a full appreciation of on a single hearing.  The plot is straightforward enough.  There’s a duke and duchess.  She falls in love with a guest.  They are betrayed by a servant.  He kills the guest and then her.  But all this happens in a highly abstracted way (made even more abstract by not being fully staged).  As the composer puts it:

My theatre is ‘post cinema’ theatre, beginning with the way the scenes are laid out – they proceed by dry blocks that ‘subtract’ in order to get the point across.

Got that?  Nor me but what I saw was a succession of scenes in which two characters exchanged fragments of text repeated multiple times.  This was actually quite useful as there were no surtitles and it made it easier to grasp what the (very few) words actually were.

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