“Life is a punishment. A hell. For some a purgatory, for none a paradise,” August Strindberg wrote. “We are compelled to commit evil and to torment our fellow mortals.” In Opera Australia’s new production of Aribert Reimann’s 1984 chamber opera The Ghost Sonata, based on the Swedish playwright’s 1907 play of the same name, director Greg Eldridge captures this mood of purgatorial decay even before the first astringent notes of Reimann’s score bristle out of a reduced Opera Australia Orchestra.

Richard Anderson, Dominica Matthews and John Longmuir in Opera Australia’s Ghost Sonata. Photo © Prudence Upton

Sheets shroud furniture, a legless piano rests coffin-like upstage, while a mirrored back wall reflects the floor to the audience, conjuring the dilapidated façade of a once-stately house, in beautifully dreamlike design by Emma Kingsbury that sees Strindberg’s fountain become a round stormwater drain doubling, in the mirror, as a porthole window. Feeding off the Opera Centre’s Scenery Workshop venue – and lit effectively by John Rayment – the set heightens the opera’s claustrophobia, reflecting and revealing in clever ways across the three acts.

Reimann’s Die Gespenstersonate, which hews very closely to Strindberg’s play, hasn’t received the...