„Ein Bett als Grab und darin einen Leichnam, der von seinem Tod nichts weiß, lebend faulend und ich mit ihm.“ ("A bed for a grave and in it a corpse that knows nothing of its death, rotting alive and I with it."Sancia Fischbein). This is how Thérèse describes her marital bed.However, the escape from this putrid cot does not become a victorious self-empowerment for Thérèse. It inevitably leads the protagonist into an even deeper hell with her lover. A hell of mutual destruction.

Thérèse came from Algeria as an inglorious "souvenir". In provincial France she becomes the ward of Madame Raquin, who soon enlists the girl as a nurse for her consumptive son Camille, and eventually as his bride. From the beginning, Thérèse is disgusted by sharing a sweaty bed with the sickly man. At the first opportunity, she begins an affair with a friend of her husband.

Zola writes: "The woman tough and mendacious, the man full-blooded and dull-witted, in this way they formed a powerfully united pair." To be able to live out their lust, they see themselves compelled to drown Camille in the Seine on a boat trip. The lovers cannot be proven guilty by the police. They believed that nothing would stand in the way of their happiness except for the abysses of their own psyche, which almost drive them to murder again in the end.

Wulfin Lieske has transformed the material into an oppressively ferocious composition. Different leading instruments are assigned to the individual characters. Madam Raquin: bass clarinet, Camille: piccolo trumpet, Thérèse: English horn, Laurent: bass trombone. In addition, the Domino Society structures the action like a choral parody from an ancient tragedy. In his first opera, Lieske shows himself to be a bold stylist who, while composing atonally and partly aleatorically at the core, he does not shy away from quotations from jazz, from the Maghreb or from (Viennese) classical music. The score comes across as brusque, even edgy, and even when the feeling of love awakens in Thérèse for the first time, it sounds like a musical quotation of love that is swallowed again and again by depraved desires and frequencies.

The initial impetus for the adaptation of Zola's novel came from Stephen Ibbotson. He conceived the scenario and integrated the textual level of the criminal profiler. The libretto is by the writer Sancia Fischbein, who always explores the colour and rhythm of language in poetry slams and spoken word performances. Her libretto exposes the pulp fiction core of Émile Zola in an opera-atypical narrative style. The vulgarity of the trashy novel comes to light, the blandness of the penny dreadful, the whole festering milieu of the Parisian bourgeoisie or, as the critics once wrote: the "smut" of Zola's novel. Zola did not seek exaggeration through narrative distance. He took the material as a found object from the street. Just as the case appeared in the Parisian gazettes: as a lurid article about an abysmal love murder on the Seine.

The title Domino points to the paradox of the material. For just as in the Domino effect, each action follows stringently from the previous one. The murder is just as inevitable as the marriage before it and the mutual disintegration at the end. On the other hand, the domino society is the static part of the opera. That small group of gamblers that meets weekly at the Raquin´s house comments on the latest gossip from Paris in an endless repeating loop. They comment on the absence of their murdered host with the same regret with which they would describe a dropped stone. They get excited, they get angry. But they never act. In this way the domino effect becomes a constant of life. It is the corset that gives everyone support. This is because, as they say, the game must go on.