Opera
‘Who wants to hear Samson et Dalila?’ Bernard Shaw asked rhetorically (in typically lordly fashion) after a concert version of Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera in 1893, the first time it was presented in Britain. ‘I respectfully suggest, Nobody.’ So Shavianly sure was the comic-curmudgeon that he left after Act Two.
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Winton is an elegant, aspirational town proud of its heritage. Sheep and cattle are the predominating industries and yet the town hosts fifteen significant annual events, including Way Out West, and a series of writers, opal, and film events. For the last five years it has hosted Opera Queensland’s Festival of Outback Opera. ... (read more)
Whither (or whether) Opera Australia?
by Robyn Archer, Michael Shmith, John Allison, Peter Tregear, Michael Halliwell •
06 March 2025
These are challenging times for Australia’s national opera company, and not just because many critics and operamanes question whether Opera Australia is in fact remotely ‘national’ in terms of programming. Since 2020 the company has recorded consecutive operating losses. Recently, it lost its artistic director (Jo Davies) and its CEO (Fiona Allan). Reviews of some of its 2024 productions were lukewarm at best. ... (read more)
Ever since its beginnings in the late sixteenth century, opera has been preoccupied with death. Illness, murder, and suicide stalk countless libretti, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Puccini’s Tosca to Berg’s Wozzeck and Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves. To the litany of horrific fates which have historically befallen the medium’s protagonists – stabbings, immolations, death by snake bite, poison and toxic mushroom, to say nothing of various wasting diseases and literal descents into hell – can now be added that most contemporary and shocking of demises: death by mass shooter.
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There is something inherently self-defeating in the famous quote about Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg being ‘the longest single smile in the German language’. Certainly, in some productions I have seen over the years, that smile has curdled into a rictus of silent suffering that comes when something is taken too seriously, thereby depleting the opera’s natural musical and dramatic energy. ... (read more)
When I was a young opera student in London many years ago, it became clear to me that there was a definite, if unwritten, vocal hierarchy. My performance interest was in the major composers of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, beginning with Mozart, but then Italian operas by Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini, culminating in Verdi and Puccini, with the occasional French opera as part of the mix. If one was lucky to have a voice with the capacity to sing these roles, this became the focus of all one’s attention. ... (read more)
What a happy time this is for Wagnerians, with a memorable Ring cycle last year from Melbourne Opera in Bendigo, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg to look forward to in February 2025 from that enterprising company. Opera Australia – unable to program Wagner in the miniscule Joan Sutherland Theatre after the embarrassments of its incomplete Ring of the early 1980s (notwithstanding some memorable casts, with the likes of Rita Hunter, Alberto Remedios, Lauris Elms, and Marilyn Richardson) – has presented the Ring thrice over the past decade, twice in Melbourne, once in Brisbane. ... (read more)
Two new and important Australian operas within a month: Gilgamesh (Symons/Garrick) in Sydney in late September, and now Eucalyptus (Mills/Oakes) in Melbourne in mid-October. This certainly hasn’t occurred for quite some time, if ever. Composer Jonathan Mills, mentored at Sydney University by Peter Sculthorpe, is probably best known for two acclaimed operas. ... (read more)
These are the opening lines of what has been described as the ‘first great work of literature’, created more than four thousand years ago in Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq. The origins of the epic poem Gilgamesh are unclear. It was written in Akkadian cuneiform on clay tablets, and found in the ruins of the library of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal (c.650 BCE); the literary style suggests an oral origin sung by bards before being transcribed. ... (read more)
Così Fan Tutte – the third and last of Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte’s collaborations – followed Le nozze di Figaro (Vienna, 1786) and Don Giovanni (Prague, 1787). This was a time of increased penury and loss for Wolfgang and Constanze (two children died during the writing of writing Così) but also one of almost unfathomable creativity for Mozart, who wrote his three last symphonies within a matter of weeks. ... (read more)
