In yesterday's post we looked at the representation of the passing of time and the fate of a heroine in a costume for a classic opera. The same themes, together with transformation, duality and trans-identity, are also analysed in a modern opera that debuted yesterday at the Wiener Staatsoper – Olga Neuwirth's "Orlando".
Based on Virginia Woolf’s eponymous novel and with a libretto by Neuwirth and the Franco-American author and playwright Catherine Filloux, the opera was first commissioned for the Wiener Staatsoper five years ago by director Dominique Meyer.
In her programme notes entitled "Orlando, a fictional musical biography" (NYC, March 2016), Neuwirth remembers the creative process that went into the piece: "When I received this commission in 2014, I immediately realized that the work I had to compose must be a hybrid grand opéra designed as a fusion of music, fashion, literature, space and video. It had to be an opera with diverse people from diverse genres that would shake up this venerable old opera house a bit."
The new work was eagerly anticipated internationally first and foremost because Neuwirth is the first woman composer to be commissioned by the Vienna State Opera in 150 years. Besides, the opera has a bonus for fashion fans as it features costumes by Comme des Garçons' Rei Kawakubo.
The story starts in 1598, when Orlando, a young English aristocrat, is being groomed for a military career. He meets Queen Elizabeth I who is enchanted by his youth and endows him with medals and properties before she dies.
In the Great Frost of 1610, festivities are held on the frozen Thames. Orlando falls passionately in love with the attractive Sasha who disappears with a Russian sailor. A deeply hurt Orlando retires to loneliness on his estate, falls into a death-like sleep, and, when he wakes up, he decides to become a poet.
Disappointed by life and art, Orlando turns his back on England and has himself posted as ambassador to a distant land. Surrounded by war, Orlando falls into a trance and receives the visit of Purity, Modesty and Chastity.
Orlando then turns into a woman, but poet colleagues Pope, Addison, Dryden and Duke aren't interested in her work (and Duke gets rather angry when she refuses his marriage proposal…).
More oppression follows for Orlando during the Victorian age, but there is time for romance when she gets married with a war photographer she met during the First World War. Together they witness the destruction and tragedy brought by World War II.
In the '60s Orlando keeps on writing and creating and, when we meet the character again in the '80s, we witness Orlando being told what she should write to be published and become successful.
Yet Orlando doesn't surrender, learns to persevere and passes the lesson onto her non-binary child. As the story closes, Orlando continues to write because: "No one has the right to obey".
Compared to Woolf's novel, Neuwirth's "opera in 19 scenes" includes some changes: rather than starting in the 16th century and ending in 1928, the story continues into these days.
"In all of the nineteen scenes, each individual situation bears on the music and at the same time everything should remain quite light, bright and disturbing. Painful, fragile, alien and beautiful. Most scenes are interrupted by the spinning of a dreidel, as a symbol for the passing of time," the composer explains in the programme notes.
The opera features a talented cast: with American mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey in the title role; singer Anna Clementi as The Narrator; countertenor Eric Jurenus as The Guardian Angel; Constance Hauman as Queen/Purity/Friend of Orlando's child; Agneta Eichenholz as Sasha/Chastity; Leigh Melrose in the role of Shelmerdine/Green and transgender American cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond, as Orlando's non-binary child.
The opera takes the theme of gender identity to another level, tackling duality, freedom of opinion, the possibility of breaking rules imposed on people by society and rejecting a standardised vision of beauty, themes that have been of interest to Neuwirth for over 30 years.
"Like Virginia Woolf’s character Orlando, I believe that art and, in my case, music, is able not only to stimulate the senses emotionally, aesthetically and intellectually, but also to connect us to other people," the composer states in the programme notes.
"Yet we should never forget that an opera will always remain an acoustically and verbally imperfect reality – for reality cannot be brought to an opera stage. What interests me about Orlando, and certainly also interested Virginia Woolf, is that art can create a free, vast and unexpected space for asking questions, making a fold in everyday space, a lively freedom of spirit that is the basis of every democracy."
Directed by Polly Graham and conducted by German composer Matthis Pintscher, musical director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain and professor of composition at the Munich College for Music and Theatre and the New York Juilliard School, and featuring projections and videos by Will Duke, musically speaking "Orlando" is characterised by diverse styles, going from boy soprano to bass baritone, with a children's choir, included.
This variety is aimed at creating a whole spectrum of sounds and vocal expressions and it is mirrored in the costumes by Comme des Garçons' Rei Kawakubo.
Quite a few contemporary fashion designers and houses that have created costumes for operas have conceived these projects as one-offs.
Kawakubo turned instead the commission into a fashionable trilogy revolving around a personal study in gender and identity that she called "Transformation and Liberation".
As you may remember from previous posts, Comme des Garçons' S/S 20 menswear collection, showcased in Paris in June, was "Act I", the label's women's show presented in September represented "Act II" and the final staging of the opera is now the third and final act of the study.
The costumes on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper are accessorised with masks by Comme des Garçons and Stephen Jones (hair by Julien d'Ys), and they revolve around Kawakubo's personal tropes, in particular her researches on volumes, structures, body morphing, distortion and deconstruction.
At times the androgynous look prevails, at others the characters are trapped in complex constructions (check out Constance Hauman in a Queen Elizabeth I costume shaped like a golden cage) in a variety of materials, that echo in some cases previous Comme des Garçons collections.
Styles range from Baroque and Elizabethan Renaissance to military and punk with moments of surrealism and psychedelia, a mix of inspirations that go well with the time-travelling themes, and that point at freedom of expression, originality and a fluid gender-twisting identity.
Neuwirth summarises all the themes of Orlando in her programme notes, explaining: "A love of oddities, of the supernatural, deceit, virtuosity, exaltation and exaggeration is the essence of Orlando, a fictional musical biography. Often it is also about memory and a sophisticated, highly subtle form of sexual attraction. And about refusing to be patronized and treated in a condescending manner – something that continually happens to women, with no end in sight."
In a nutshell, Neuwirth's opera tries to shake up conventions, questioning norms: while in traditional operas a tragic fate usually awaits a female heroine, in Orlando a woman triumphs.
Rebelling against stereotypical roles, she fights for creativity and, while questioning patriarchal history, gender and social conventions, and condemning intolerance and misogyny, she also challenges all sorts of binary systems (Neuwirth also subverts the rules in the pit of the Vienna State Opera orchestra, adding an electric guitar and two synthesisers among the classical instruments), destroying them and choosing who and what she wants to be.
You would love to see Olga Neuwirth's "Orlando", but can't go to Vienna? Don't despair: the performance on 18 December will be broadcast in HD around the world through Wiener Staatsoper live, so you will soon be able to enjoy this fashionably revolutionary opera live from the comfort of your home.
Image credits for this post
All images in this post courtesy and © Wiener Staatsoper