Where the Wild Things Are (opera) dream is over, and Max starts to eat the food his Mama had left for him during his dream time. Where the Wild Things Are (opera) Where the Wild Things Are, Op. 20, is a 'fantasy' opera in one act by Oliver Knussen to a libretto by Maurice Sendak, based on Sendak's own children's book of the same title. Knussen composed the music from 1979 to 1983, on commission from the Opèra National, Brussels. In form and subject matter the work relates to Maurice Ravel's "L'enfant et les sortilèges", as well as Stravinsky's "The Nightingale". Knussen also included a number
Where the Wild Things Are as an escape from their chaotic weekly visits, on Sunday afternoons, to his family's Brooklyn home. Sendak, as a child, had observed his relatives as being "all crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes", with blood-stained eyes and "big and yellow" teeth, who pinched his cheeks until they were red. These relatives, like Sendak's parents, were poor Jewish immigrants from Poland, whose remaining family in Europe were killed during the Holocaust while Sendak was in his early teens. As a child, however, he saw them only as "grotesques". When working on the 1983 opera adaptation of the book with Oliver