Gilgamesh
The Musical
A Rock Opera based on the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Book, Music and Lyrics by Andrea Adriani.
Gilgamesh began as a question: why has no one made a rock opera out of the oldest story in the world?
The Epic of Gilgamesh predates Homer by fifteen centuries. It contains a tyrant, a wild man, a goddess scorned, a monster in a forest, a great flood, and a hero who travels to the edge of the earth in search of immortality — and comes home empty-handed. It is a story about power, loss, and the limits of human striving.
Rock opera is not an arbitrary choice of form. The epic was originally performed — chanted, sung, ritualised. The distance between that ancient oral tradition and the amplified, percussive language of progressive rock is shorter than it appears. Both are concerned with myth, with excess, with the body, with mortality. Both demand an audience that listens with its whole self. The work asks what this story feels like from the inside, in the present tense, at full volume.
Gilgamesh loses everything he fights for. He returns to his city, looks up at its walls, and understands — for the first time — that they had always been enough.
That is the rock opera. That is the ending. Everything else is the journey.
Note on style and structure.
This is a sung-through rock opera.
The text is designed for musical performance rather than spoken theatre.
Stage directions are minimal and functional, serving as performance cues for staging, lighting, and movement.
Song titles mark formal musical numbers and act as structural divisions within continuous scenes.
Act 1: The Forging of Friendship
Mesopotamia, 2700 B.C.
In Uruk, the people complain to the gods about King Gilgamesh’s rule: two-thirds divine, he is as magnificent as he is arrogant and tyrannical. To temper him, the gods create his counterpart, the wild Enkidu, who lives among the animals until a hunter discovers him. On his father’s advice, the hunter sends Shamat, a temple prostitute of Ishtar, to seduce Enkidu and draw him away from the herd; once she has taught him her arts, she persuades him to travel to Uruk and challenge Gilgamesh, who has already foreseen his arrival in a dream and consulted his mother, the semi-divine Ninsun.
Enkidu and Shamat arrive in Uruk just as Gilgamesh is exercising his droit du seigneur at a wedding. Enkidu interrupts the ceremony; the two clash, then recognize each other’s strength and become friends. Thirsting for glory, Gilgamesh announces an expedition to the Cedar Forest to kill its guardian, the fearsome ogre Humbaba, despite the elders’ objections. The two heroes set out under Ninsun’s protective prayers; after a troubling dream that Enkidu reads as a good omen, they reach the forest and kill Humbaba, ignoring his pleas for mercy. As they fell trees, Enkidu finds a cedar so magnificent he vows to make a great temple gate from its timber.Act 2: The Search for Immortality
Back in Uruk, Gilgamesh rejects the advances of the goddess Ishtar, reminding her of the fate of her past lovers. Furious, she convinces her father Anu to unleash the Bull of Heaven to ravage the city; Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay the beast together, further enraging Ishtar, who calls upon the gods for vengeance. Soon after, Enkidu falls ill. In a fevered dream he sees the gods deciding his fate, and on his deathbed he curses both the cedar gate and the prostitute who civilized him, before turning the curse into a blessing.
Devastated by his friend’s death and his own newly-realized mortality, Gilgamesh leaves Uruk in search of Utnapishtim the Faraway, who knows the secret of eternal life. He reaches the edge of the world, where the scorpion-men warn him of the dangers ahead but let him pass, and arrives at the tavern of Siduri, a divine brewer who initially bars her door against him. Won over by his story, she directs him to the ferryman Urshanabi. In his desperation, Gilgamesh destroys Urshanabi’s Stone Crew, complicating the sea crossing; he must instead cut long poles to punt the boat across the Waters of Death.
From Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh hears the story of the Great Flood and how the old man was granted immortality as a reward, and learns of a plant on the seabed that can restore youth. He dives down and retrieves it, but while he rests a serpent steals and devours it, dashing his hopes. Returning to Uruk with Urshanabi, Gilgamesh shows him the city’s great walls — the true, everlasting legacy he leaves behind.
| Characters | Vocal range |
|---|---|
| ISHTAR, goddess of love and war | Mezzo-soprano |
| ENKIDU, Gilgamesh’s counterpart | Tenor |
| THE HUNTER | Bass-Baritone |
| THE HUNTER’S FATHER | Bass-Baritone |
| SHAMAT, the temple harlot | Soprano |
| GILGAMESH, king of Uruk | Tenor |
| NINSUN, Gilgamesh’s mother | Alto |
| HUMBABA, the ogre of the cedar forest | Bass |
| SCORPION-MEN (2), wardens of the mountain | Baritone |
| SIDURI, alewife of the gods | Mezzo-soprano |
| URSHANABI, the ferryman | Baritone |
| UTNAPISHTIM, the Far-Away | Bass-Baritone |
Ensembles (SATB), dancers, performers and walk-ons.
For a streamlined, highly cost-effective production, role doubling among principal characters is fully supported.
The opera comprises 39 musical numbers, with a total running time of approximately 2 hours and 14 minutes.
Listen to selected audio demos of the main songs:
Listen to more demos on SoundCloud.
Demo vocals and virtual arrangements rendered via ACE Studio based on original full scores and libretto.
Download the complete booklet and sheet music:
Libretto:
Lead sheets:
Andrea Adriani
Foligno (PG), Italy
Gilgamesh – The Musical
© 2026 Andrea Adriani. All rights reserved.Selected passages freely adapted from the Standard Babylonian Version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, based on public-domain source material. The dramatic characterisations, situations, and dialogue in this work are fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, actual events, or organisations is entirely coincidental.Registration:
U.S. Copyright Office, PAu [pending]
Writers Guild of America, West, #2000674