The Sinbadventurers (German: Die Hamburger Sindbadauken) is an opera for children composed by Benjamin Gordon [de] with a libretto by Francis Hüsers.
The first imagines an encounter between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Otto von Bismarck, who scheme to get Heligoland back from the British; the second recounts the catastrophic demise of the 14th century city Rungholt, explaining how gold might have found its way into the North Sea.
[2] For 2015, the final year of her ten-year tenure as general music director, Simone Young approached Gordon and Hüsers to create a new opera that had a connection to the city of Hamburg.
[1] Inspired by multiple legends (Homer's Odyssey, Sinbad the Sailor, Klaus Störtebeker), Hüsers wrote a story about three children who build their own raft and then fall into the hands of pirates, using his own experience of a raft-trip gone wrong as the starting point.
He interweaves historical events (The Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty of 1890) as well as the lost city of Rungholt, which was completely wiped out in the Saint Marcellus's flood in 1362, causing at least 25,000 deaths.
About the opera, Hüsers wrote: The moral that should be perceptible – despite all of the playfulness in the text – is that everyone – not matter how unfamiliar they might seem – is deserving of our compassion, and secondly, having courage not to shy away from them but to interact with them will always pay off.