Boldness has greatness in it. Do it now!
Goethe
The Volksopera in Vienna
The sun is rising on Vienna on this September morning.
Whenever I visit at this time of the year the weather is always good, it's a perfect time to visit. This trip was a 48-hour one on a low budget. Flying fin rom Stansted to Bratislava, and it's only an hour or so into Wein on a bus through rather beautiful flat landscape with hills in the distance. My mission in particular was to visit my new publisher, Universal Edition. I have a very good British publisher Composers Edition but have leant that most composers have more than one publisher, my husband has four!
Wow was my first impression. Universal Edition’s offices are in the concert house of the Vienna Philharmonic, the epicentre of classical music. After my one-hour meeting with my publishers, which I am assured by my Vienna chums was a good sign, I was allowed a sneaky view through a little round window into the concert hall where the Vienna Philharmonic, dressed in mufti, were rehearsing Strauss. Thrilling!
It was, as you would expect, a high-powered meeting with Universal Edition and I was impressed by the publisher's professionalism and of course their confidence in the provenance of their lead composers, in particular of the living ones like Arvo Pärt. Our conversations ranged from promoting my choral music, in particular Magnificat, which is published with them, and which was performed in Ely Cathedral this year. I chose to publish it with UE because the text is entirely in Latin. It is the Magnificat text interfaced with Rumi texts translated into Latin adding a Middle Eastern flavour which is of course the setting of the Magnificat.
The hall of the concert house which houses busts of UE’s famous composers
The conversation moved on to the trickier subject of opera commissions
and here they seemed quite negative. Quite Austrian, I might say! And I suppose they have some logic. If you look at the programming of contemporary opera in Opera Houses around Europe you will find there is an evident omission of new work. The situation now is of promoting less and less new opera, which is contrary to the fact that there are more and more people composing operas. What perhaps the publishers weren't positive enough about was my current invitation to compose an opera in association with Helsinki Opera, by its artistic director Thomas de Mallet Burgess. This is a major coup and one that was hard won through my daring attendance at an Opera Europa conference in Turin last autumn. So, I think they could have been more positive about my prospects in achieving lift off with opera.
Having said that I can see that in terms of sales of music, choral music has much more mileage. And hence their adoration of Arvo Pärt. This led me to think about the reasons why choral music is so much more accessible and saleable. In particular contemporary choral music has one overwhelming advantage, and that is that the singers can read from the music as they are performing it, and in contemporary opera the poor singers have to spend hours and hours learning music. That they have to learn it off by heart and may then never get to sing it again is a downer. I myself as an opera singer remember doing this with many contemporary operas. Our dedication is unprecedented for the returns. Also, a lot of contemporary opera just frankly isn't worth repeating. So I laid down the gauntlet to the UE publishers and said that what we need to do as a community is persuade Opera Houses to have a much broader spectrum of genres of opera instead of, at the moment particularly in Europe, where there is only one received style of contemporary opera, effectively a post-Darmstadt style. Although I personally quite like this kind of opera, it really isn't an audience-puller. I went on to say that, for example, the reason why Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes is so successful is because it is almost bordering on a musical style. Of course, it has musical content in terms of, say, the sea interludes, but it is very much segmented into accessible musical numbers and I don't think we should forget that this is one of the reasons why it is so successful.
In Europe, traditionally they have had operetta. But I now see at the Vienna Volksoper that they are even doing Gilbert and Sullivan for goodness sake! I think a broader spectrum of composers for contemporary opera in the major Opera Houses would be a significant way to change the landscape and to emulate more what happens in the United States, where there has always been a tradition in major Opera Houses, such as San Francisco, of producing at least two to three new operas a season. And this is how composers like John Adams and Philip Glass have really made their mark. They are in fact essentially Industries.
Where I am staying in Vienna is actually near the modern Concert Hall where you have the popularist concerts of the likes of Hans Zimmer. Here commercialism in a sense liberates the composer to have a real opportunity. In contrast it seems to be an almost grotesque elitism in the Opera Houses who favour a tiny minority of assigned composers, many of whom I am assured come from influential families. To a few elite people in the Opera world and the classical music world they may be well known, the usual suspects I call them, but to the rest of the world their music doesn't mean anything. I addition because of the intellectual style of these operas most ordinary people can't relate to them. Compositionally they are generally very heavy on the use of the orchestra. There is rarely a shapely tune for the singers to sing. and frankly nothing very memorable, apart from the texture of the orchestra which is always absolutely magnificent. Often the subjects of these operas are very glum and don't relate to contemporary issues, for example aggressively continuing to portray woman as victims Their representation of hackneyed story lines is at odds with the modernity of their music. Well, my rant’s over on that one!
After I left Universal Edition and walked back to Karlsplatz, I went on to the Musiktheatertage Festival which is a fringe festival & conference devoted to creating contemporary musical theatre. Now “musical theatre” was a new term invented in the second half of the last century for contemporary opera. However, this terminology has failed miserably to entice people to attend it. A better model is the way ballet transformed into dance. So much so that major ballet companies now use contemporary dance in their ballet. The scene is very alive. But we don't have the same exchange and flow of values between modern opera and standard repertoire, so instead we have these what I call fringe-type conferences like Musiktheatertage, which frankly have negligible impact on the major opera houses. In terms of the development of new opera ,that's a big shame because ,just very occasionally, something very interesting does come up. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to compose. an opera The Butt for Musiktheatertage nine years ago. The Butt was a big success.
The music of The Butt was stylistic with great variety: it was skilfully worked and crafted, offering a variety of moods and motivic links. Der Standard, Vienna 2016
The Butt: Self. Musiktheatertage Festival, Vienna 2016
https://youtu.be/ZAGo-Jmiv9w?si=QAaKgTmCgA58IB8B
I'm not sure that the festival has really taken a turn for the better since my opera première. It now seems to make its work more and more abstract and vague. In most of the presentations I saw yesterday there was virtually no solo singing featured which is what we associate with Opera or even music theatre. Instead there was a form of vocal Music Theatre which is essentially dramatized choral music. This is all very well and good, but it is very difficult for a choir to actually learn a work off by heart, and so I believe this type of choral work really won't have the legs to go the long haul or be of interest, say, to a publisher like Universal Edition. I'm not really certain what is achieved by having to sing off the book with lots of fancy lighting states. There was also a distinctive lack of meaningful musical content to any of the presentations at the conference yesterday. Another thing that irritated me was that about 80% of the presenters were men. We only had one female composer and in a coy female composer way, she only told the story of her work, she didn't actually present any of her music. From the male composers, the music presented ranged from poor to reasonably good enough, but nothing outstanding.
I was invited to chair a table of a discussion at the conference about how to bring inclusivity and diversity into opera ,which I found that very stimulating. In particular some older creative men were dismissive of the whole idea of reaching out to people and being interactive. I don't know if this is a characteristic of Austrian Society, but there seemed to be a big divide between the male participants and the female participants. Females are very interested in interactivity whereas males were still quite attached to the idea of being artists on pedestals. In other words, maintaining an elite.
I felt that, out of all the participants that encapsulated how we might really incorporate inclusivity and diversity into our artistic practice, there was a young cellist, who quite openly came out with a statement that she was autistic. And she said that she really was overwhelmed sometimes in the presence of a lot of people and that it felt like broken glass was being thrown at her. I found her sharing very captivating, and it was a situation that I felt that I would, as a composer myself ,like to pursue through composing a piece. I suggested this to her: A kind of dialogue where the composer translated her innermost feelings into a piece of music that she could then express on the cello and she said yes.
The best keynote speaker was Guy Coolen, who is the festival director of ‘O’ in Rotterdam, Artistic Director of Music Theatre Transparant and on the board of Opera Europa. Sometimes I feel I love Guy for what he says so much, that I wish he could be the master of the universe! He really calls out the elephant in the room. With this focus of diversity on this particular occasion, he called out the fact that we can talk about diversity and integration but in truth, as practitioners, we often remain very much invested in our latest artistic vision and in keeping the audience at bay by saying “it is we who have something really important to say” rather than checking in with the audience about what they would really want. And that reminded me of my own compositional practice of “quilting”, which I developed as part of my practice-based PhD. My practical experience of performing gives me an edge as a leader in understanding what works with singers and what they really need. This is what drives me to re-invent ways of presenting choral music and opera. This has led me to develop an inclusive approach which promotes collaboration and empowerment whilst nurturing ambition. My opera Quilt Song has at its heart a connection with community.
https://youtu.be/VhlmRoK4rd0?si=_MAzp2iN6n_5yoZf
Quilt Song: Self, Birmingham Old Rep 2018
Quilt Song was an opera built around communities in Birmingham for them to perform in the Opera alongside professionals. Tickets were free, and we filled the Birmingham Old Rep Theatre for two nights with audiences who had never been to the Opera before. So this is my vision, and I think to some extent Guy’s vision for opera, which is to open up to new audiences. Opera is too good an art form to just keep for an elite, as I said in my dissertation.
If we said that football was only available. to an elite audience there would be outraged protest
At the end of my trip Guy called me to a meeting to discuss developing one of my new ideas with Festival “O” next year called GIANTESS. Combined with composing an opera The Queen of The Sea with development support from Helsinki Opera, my interactive composing career is cooking.
