There are 7 characters in the opera, which include:

Emperor Uberall:            A tyrannical ruler who lives in isolation

The Loudspeaker:            A bodiless, impersonal narrator of events

Death:                          The personification of death as a retired soldier

Harlequin:                     A jester and subject of Uberall’s oppressed kingdom

A Soldier:                     A warrior in Uberall’s great war

Girl Sodier:                   Also Girl with Bobbed Hair, she opposes, then befriends, the Soldier

The Drummer:               The announcer of Uberall’s mandates to the kingdom’s subjects

The Loudspeaker opens the opera by setting the scene and introducing the characters. The plot develops from there as a lonely Harlequin describes woeful life in a kingdom lacking love and laughter: “we’d sell our souls at the nearest fair…will no one buy us, since every man wants to be rid of himself?” Death happens upon the scene, and together they comment ruefully on how the passing of days is hardly noticeable anymore in such a grim environment. Yet Death scoffs at the jester’s miserable request for relief through death, proclaiming his own situation to be far more severe and prolonged. In an aria, Death laments how his function no longer commands the same respect it once had, with warriors dressed in finery to meet him on the battlefield. Wearied from previous ravages of combat, Death has little interest in keeping pace with Uberall’s “motorized chariots of war,” which make a mockery of the “old-fashioned craft of dying.”

The Drummer then steps forth to deliver a new mandate from Emperor Uberall.  Declaring “each against each other, no survivors,” she describes an all-encompassing war across the kingdom, one in which weapons are carried by every man, woman, and child alike. Death hears this decree and is outraged at the Emperor’s presumptuous nature. “To take men’s souls is my job, not his!” he fumes, angered that the Uberall would so easily take his services for granted. Here he declares an official strike, warning that the future of mankind will not only be great, as the Emperor suggested, but long, and breaks his sabre upon the ground.

The second act takes the listener to the Emperor’s palace, where progress of the war is being carefully monitored. Death’s scheme is discovered when word is received of a hanged man who has not died after eighty minutes, even after being shot. To the dismay and panic of the Emperor, the Loudspeaker tells of thousands of other soldiers “wrestling with life…doing their best to die.” Concerned that this turn of events will negatively affect his power as ruler, Uberall quickly demands a propaganda campaign in which the situation is spun as the gift of eternal life to his subjects. Yet he wonders, “Death, where is thy sting? Where is thy victory, Hell?”

An encounter between the Soldier and the Bobbed-Hair Girl comprises most of the third act. They come upon each other as enemies, but when death cannot separate them, their thoughts turn to love. Together they dream of distant places where kind words exist alongside “meadows filled with color and fragrance.” Flaunting the call of war as a sensual attraction for mankind, the Drummer attempts to entice the two back into battle. “Now death is dead and so we need to fight no more!” cries the young girl, unheeding of the Drummer’s bait, and with her soldier sings “Only love can unite us, unite us all together.”

In the final act, the frantic Emperor continues to oversee from afar his crumbling kingdom, where the desperate population rebels against the torturous limbo between life and death. Harlequin appeals to him while in his disturbed state, reminding him of his innocent childhood. Despite the Drummer’s urges to remain strong, these recollections interrupt his feverish calculations of potential deaths and give him pause, spurring him to muse before a covered mirror: “What do men look like? Am I still a man or just the adding machine of God?”

As he pulls away the mirror’s cloth, he is faced with the reflection of Death. “Who are you?” he demands of the vision, prompting a self-defining aria from Death. In it he compares his role to that of a Gardener “who roots up wilting weeds, life’s worn-out fellows.” Regretful of the anguish his abdication has caused, Death offers an ultimatum to the Emperor: “I’m prepared to make peace, if you are prepared to make a sacrifice: will you be the first one to try out the new death?” Uberall finally complies, and the mercy of death once again falls upon the suffering people. In the opera’s closing chorus, Death is praised and prevailed upon to “teach us to keep your holiest law: Thou shalt not use the name of Death in vain now and forever!”