O Quickly Disappearing Photograph

Join us in the Ebert Room for a pre-performance showing of O Quickly Disappearing Photograph, an installation by William Kentridge on select performances of L’Orfeo.

The installation will be accompanied by a live pianist, Harry Rylance and will be held in the Ebert Room.

Dates and Times

Sunday 14 June, 2.15pm and 3.00pm
Thursday 18 June, 3.45pm and 4.30pm
Sunday 21 June, 2.15pm and 3.00pm
Wednesday 24 June, 3.45pm and 4.30pm
Saturday 27 June, 3.45pm and 4.30pm
Friday 10 July, 3.45pm and 4.30pm
Sunday 12 July, 2.15pm and 3.00pm
Saturday 18 July, 3.45pm and 4.30pm
Monday 20 July, 3.45pm and 4.30pm
Thursday 23 July, 3.45pm and 4.30pm
Saturday 25 July, 3.45pm and 4.30pm

This event is free for Festival 2026 ticket holders for the dates above. Places must be booked in advance – click below to book your free place.

A thirteen-minute film by William Kentridge, made to accompany Luigi Dallapiccola’s Quaderno musicale di Annalibera — a solo piano piece of equal and deliberate brevity, composed in 1952.

The film serves as prologue and footnote to the production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at Glyndebourne, drawing on Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes — a counter-telling of the myth that quietly turns the familiar story inside out. Images made for the opera sit alongside images made specifically for the music, held together by Dallapiccola’s precise, searching piano writing.

Where the opera tells Orpheus’s story, the film offers Eurydice’s view of her own predicament. Less rescue. More reckoning.

Commissioned by the international Piano Festival Le Piano Symphonique in association with the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester, the film had its world premiere in Lucerne on 17 January 2026.

Creative Team

Concept & Director
William Kentridge 

Video Editor
Žana Marović 

Music
Luigi Dallapiccola – Quaderno musicale di Annalibera

Text inspired by Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes
Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

O Quickly Disappearing Photograph was commissioned by the international Piano Festival ‘Le Piano Symphonique’ in association with the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester. The world premiere took place in Lucerne on January 17th 2026.