Based in Tyrol, Mexican-born Arturo Fuentes will compose and stage the multimedia musical theater work Carlota’s Room, a monodrama about the unhappy Belgian princess Charlotte who was gradually overcome by madness. After the death of her husband, Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico, she continued to write letters to him for 60 years (!) in which she imagines him coming home again. Napoleon III installed Maximilian as a puppet monarch in Mexico in 1864. She later returned to Europe as pressure on the monarchy began to grow. The execution by firing squad of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in 1867 is etched in our cultural memory by the famous painting by Édouard Manet. Carlota, who from then on never leaves her chambers in Miramare castle near Trieste, gazes out at the ocean and dreams of the past as the place of an impossible love. Carlota died in 1927, the year Charles Lindbergh achieves the first solo transatlantic flight. In a letter to her husband she exclaims how much faster and easier it will be for them to meet! The sound of the airplane engine is the point of departure for the musical composition, in which Carlota’s various mental states are expressed through various vocal techniques and through “electronic shadows”. The piece will be performed by the charismatic soprano Sarah Maria Sun and Klangforum Wien. The libretto is based on the book Noticias del Imperio (News from the Empire) by the celebrated Mexican author Fernando del Paso.