Czernowin often associates her scores with natural phenomena—water, wind, snow. Photograph by Irina Rozovsky for The New Yorker

“The days stand like angels in blue and gold, incomprehensible, above the ring of annihilation.” Those words, from Erich Maria Remarque’s great war novel of 1929, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” are at the heart of “Infinite Now,” a harrowing and darkly majestic opera by the Israeli-born composer Chaya Czernowin. The work had its première last month, at the Flemish Opera, in Ghent, not far from some of the bloodiest battlefields of the First World War. Czernowin’s score includes eruptions of orchestral, vocal, and electronic pandemonium that evoke with unnerving immediacy the chaos of battle and its aftermath. She has achieved, however, something more than a sombre memorial to death and destruction—a crowded genre in modern opera. Episodes of unearthly beauty hint at Remarque’s angelic presence, which seems to arise whenever man-made horror collides with nature.

Czernowin was born in Haifa in 1957, a child of Polish Holocaust survivors. She has lived variously in Germany, Japan, and Austria, and since 2009 she has been based at Harvard, where she has taught some of the most vibrant composers of the rising generation. Her work is rooted in the radical musical languages that surfaced after the Second World War: the frenzied gestures of Iannis Xenakis, the visceral timbres of Helmut Lachenmann, the elemental textures of Giacinto Scelsi, and the hyper-dense polyphony of Brian Ferneyhough, who was one of Czernowin’s teachers. Her signal achievement has been to give an organic logic to the explosive aesthetics of the avant-garde. She often associates her scores with natural phenomena—water, wind, snow, crystal structures, vegetative growth—and the resultant music feels like the outcome of irreversible physical processes. Her 2010 orchestral piece “The Quiet,” recently recorded on the Wergo label, is typical. It begins in near-silence, with faint bass-drum rolls, a tremor of gong, fingernail scratches on drumskins, and breathy noises from the strings. Emanating from a large orchestra, such sounds create a sense of depopulated vastness. In the final few minutes, a quadruple-forte avalanche of brass and percussion is unleashed—a musical equivalent of the butterfly effect, in which slight changes trigger cataclysms.

Such momentous shifts occur throughout “Infinite Now,” which unfolds in a continuous two-and-a-half-hour span, the aural equivalent of an almost limitless landscape. Its plot consists of two seemingly unrelated stories that become interwoven. One strand is based on Luk Perceval’s multilingual theatre piece “Front,” which had its première in Hamburg, in 2014, in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War. That text incorporates excerpts from “All Quiet on the Western Front” and from another war novel, Henri Barbusse’s “Under Fire,” alongside soldiers’ letters and eyewitness testimonies, in English, Flemish, French, and German. The other strand is “Homecoming,” a cryptic tale by the contemporary Chinese writer Can Xue, in which a woman returns to a house she has known since childhood and finds it strangely transformed; the present owner insists that it is now poised at the edge of an abyss, and when the woman tries to leave she encounters inexplicable obstacles. The common thread is entrapment: the soldiers cannot escape the trenches, the woman cannot escape the house.

When the Flemish Opera approached Czernowin about making an opera of “Front,” she initially resisted, feeling that she had spent enough time in the realm of war. Her first theatrical work, the 2000 opera “Pnima,” is an oblique study in the incommunicability of trauma: an elderly Holocaust survivor tries to convey his experience to his grandson, who struggles to grasp what he hears—the opera has no words, only vocalizations—but who is overwhelmed nonetheless. Czernowin, who had been seeking a way to bring “Homecoming” to the stage, hit upon the notion of combining the story with “Front,” realizing that she could amplify the resonance of both. In a commentary on “Infinite Now,” she writes that the texts embody, from male and female perspectives alike, “an existential state of nakedness where the ordinary sense of control and reason is stripped away.”

“Infinite Now” is divided into six acts, each of which begins with a recording of metal gates clanging shut. (Czernowin and her collaborator, Carlo Laurenzi, from ircam, the Paris center for sonic research, took the sound from YouTube videos about prison life.) Then a complex electronic fabric kicks in: we hear, at one time or another, voices talking; a woman reading “Homecoming” in Mandarin; crowds and demonstrations; industrial hums and drones; train sounds; the flutter of bird wings; cracking ice; wind and water; news broadcasts; bits of popular song; and high-pitched sine tones. From this enveloping texture, voices and instruments emerge, sometimes assertively and sometimes almost imperceptibly. Two trios of singers deliver passages from “Front” and “Homecoming.” Six speaking actors flesh out the wartime characters, of whom the most striking are Paul Bäumer, Remarque’s doomed protagonist, and Nurse Elisabeth, who is based on Ellen La Motte, the author of a brutal memoir of nursing on the Western Front. When a deserter tries to kill himself, Elisabeth bitterly observes, “We must try to save his life, help him recover until he is well enough to be stood up against a wall and shot.”

Those lacerating words occur in the fourth act, in which the two halves of “Infinite Now” begin to merge. Up to this point, a characteristic Czernowin mood of tense expectancy has prevailed, with stretches of rustling and whispering interrupted by spasms of orchestral fury. The tone shifts, though, when the protagonist of “Homecoming” tries and fails to leave the house. In an extravagant, register-leaping aria for contralto voice—delivered spectacularly in Ghent by Noa Frenkel, a regular Czernowin collaborator—the woman sings of crawling outside the gate, in search of familiar grasslands, and encountering “something hard and moving” under her feet. Pieces of Paul Bäumer’s narrative are juxtaposed with that nightmare scenario, with the nurse’s tale following soon afterward. The musical textures then thin out, as if the proximity of horror had brought clarity. At times, the harmonies brush against traditional tonality: a D-minor triad on a guitar here, an E-flat-major triad in the voices there.

In the fifth act, the cataclysm arrives. Wind howls on the soundtrack. The strings bow so hard that pitch disappears. Vocalists let out strangulated cries. Huge cluster chords accumulate. It all builds to a sonic hurricane—one of the most awesome storms in musical history. A wrenching scene from Remarque ensues, in which Bäumer watches an enemy soldier die. “Comrade, I did not want to kill you,” he says. “Forgive me.” In the final act, the action seems to slide into the present, as voices are altered to sound as though they were coming from radios or speakerphones. (“As in Skype with problems,” the score notes.) The entire rampaging force of Czernowin’s orchestra is funnelled into isolated tones—at one point, a three-minute brass drone on G. In the closing section, industrial noises give way to natural ones: cicadas, steps in dry leaves, wind in trees, rushing water. The last words belong to Can Xue’s heroine: “In the darkness I put on my clothes.”

The forces in Ghent, under the baton of Titus Engel, made a heroic effort with a score that imposes unrelenting demands on its performers. Terry Wey delivered haunting countertenor lines, and four expert Czernowin collaborators—the guitarists Nico Couck and Yaron Deutsch and the cellists Séverine Ballon and Christina Meissner—were featured in solo instrumental parts. Perceval directed the production, in austere fashion; the sets were minimal and abstract, with actors and singers inching about the stage in the Robert Wilson fashion. Although the severity befitted the subject, I wondered whether Perceval might have done more to differentiate the opera’s two worlds, so that the audience could better register the epiphany of their becoming one. Then again, an atmosphere of engulfing mystery, of the uncanny, is integral to the power of Czernowin’s conception. “Infinite Now” captures the terror, and the wonder, of discovering that the world you thought you knew has forever changed. ♦