“If you dare nothing, you can change nothing,” the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth recently told the magazine Profil. “In the moment of paralysis and the resulting decay, there is always the possibility of bringing something about.” Neuwirth was addressing the creative stasis at international opera houses, where a few dozen canonical pieces are heard with numbing frequency. The reactionary outlook of these institutions is evident in the fact that operas by female composers remain unusual. Neuwirth’s “Orlando,” a radical feminist adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, recently had its première at the Vienna State Opera. It stands in contrast to a Viennese season that features women dying of consumption, flinging themselves off buildings, and riding horses into funeral pyres.
Notwithstanding the conservatism of the opera business, many top houses offer a world première every season or two. On a one-week swing through Europe in early December, I caught three such productions: Hans Abrahamsen’s “The Snow Queen,” at the Royal Danish Theatre, in Copenhagen; Chaya Czernowin’s “Heart Chamber,” at the Deutsche Oper, in Berlin; and “Orlando.” One suspects that, in many cases, commissioning work plays a palliative role: a company can applaud itself for having acknowledged contemporary reality and then scurry back to the safe space of the past. I wonder, though, whether a slow sea change might be in progress. “That was my life,” a woman said to a friend after Czernowin’s opera. It is not a comment you hear often at “Don Giovanni” or “Tosca.”
“The Snow Queen” is outwardly the most traditional of the three new operas. It is based on the mighty fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, which has undergone dozens of adaptations, including, tenuously, “Frozen,” the animated film and Broadway musical. Abrahamsen and his co-librettist, Henrik Engelbrecht, hew more closely than most of their predecessors to the Andersen original. This is not surprising, given that they are Danish artists taking hold of a Danish classic. The story pivots on the shattering of a mirror, manufactured by a troll, that magnifies the worst in people and hides the good. A boy named Kay, having caught slivers of the mirror in his eye and his heart, falls prey to the allure of the Snow Queen, who takes him on her sled and entraps him in her ice kingdom. Gerda, Kay’s childhood friend, must undergo various fantastical far-northern adventures before she can save him.
The trickiest challenge in making a new version of “The Snow Queen” is how to handle the title character, who all too easily exemplifies the stereotype of the cold, predatory female. Abrahamsen upends that dynamic by choosing to give the role to a male singer—at the première, the formidable Danish bass-baritone Johan Reuter. It would seem that the malignity of the troll is inhabiting the Snow Queen’s form. Unfortunately, Francisco Negrin, who directed the inaugural production, obscured this insight by subsuming the role into a confusing multipart character called the Universal Being, who does not appear in the libretto or the score. With its blandly abstract set and kitschy L.E.D. lighting, the staging did little to flesh out Andersen’s world.
No matter: Robert Houssart, conducting the Royal Danish Orchestra, exulted in the kaleidoscopic gorgeousness of Abrahamsen’s score. The composer belongs to a Danish new-music tradition that has refashioned simple-seeming tonal materials into a language of gleaming freshness. “The Snow Queen,” like prior Abrahamsen works, has textures that shine and dance before the ears, with strings issuing harmonics high in their range, brass rumbling in the lower registers, and blurred triads in the middle range. More surprising are passages of childlike innocence—for example, a euphonious chorus of singing flowers—and episodes of polyrhythmic orchestral exuberance, as in Kay’s wild sleigh ride with the Queen. This magnificent score deserves to travel the world; in a suitably cinematic guise, it could conquer the Met.
If “The Snow Queen” extends the medium’s long-standing attachment to fable and legend, Czernowin’s “Heart Chamber” nods to the modern tradition of Zeitoper—“now opera,” or opera of the moment. Composers of the nineteen-twenties pioneered the trend, rejecting mythic trappings in favor of ocean liners and foxtrots. “Heart Chamber,” for which Czernowin wrote her own libretto, tells of a contemporary love affair infiltrated by anxieties and hesitations. In an early scene, the soprano sings, “Hey! Pick up your phone! Are you home?” Later, the baritone sings, “You can’t just suddenly close up like that.” The feeling is less of two souls being joined in eternal love than of two individuals negotiating the intersection of their separate lives.
At first glance, Czernowin, an Israeli native who teaches at Harvard, is an unlikely composer for such a project. Much of her work has tended toward images of primordial upheaval and elemental change. Her previous operas, “Pnima” and “Infinite Now,” conjured scenes of twentieth-century catastrophe: the Holocaust in the former, the First World War in the latter. She avoids familiar harmonic signposts and is inclined toward spectacularly vivid eruptions of instrumental and electronic sound. The wonder of “Heart Chamber” is how she uses her radical sonic palette to evoke the stream of consciousness beneath the surface of ordinary life.
The most astonishing passage comes when the baritone answers the phone and accepts the idea of going for a walk. This nondescript exchange unleashes an apocalyptic inundation from the orchestra—one of several episodes marked “Sound surge / flood” in the score—with brass bellowing stentorian tones and a pianist pummelling the keyboard with his hands and arms. We experience the terror, as well as the joy, of intense love. (At the première performances, instrumental roles were taken by members of Ensemble Nikel, favorite collaborators of Czernowin’s.) “Infinite Now” contains a similar all-enveloping storm, suggestive of war’s chaos. Here the storm is internal, and within a minute or two it fades, across an expanse of sustained chords, into near-silence, with a single voice emitting isolated, high-pitched peeps. The spoken dialogue that follows is, again, mundane: “Cold tonight. . . . The days are shorter.” But the sensuous, breathy texture beneath the voices indicates a transformation.
The challenge in staging such a piece is to make visible this disparity between outer appearance and inner feeling. Claus Guth, who directed the Deutsche Oper production, seemed concerned more with the exterior side. He and the design team presented alluring visuals—a staircase outside an apartment complex was the dominant image, often with figures moving in slow motion—but they had the look of a chilly, clinical art film about the disaffected bourgeoisie. Those interior storms went largely unremarked. Even so, Patrizia Ciofi and Dietrich Henschel gave vibrant, nuanced performances of the lead roles, and the composer-conductor Johannes Kalitzke marshalled an opulently raging orchestra.
“Orlando” was the most ambitious of the three operas, and, perhaps inevitably, the most problematic. It attempted to be mythic and modern in equal measure. Woolf’s novel tells of an Elizabethan nobleman and poet who abides through the centuries and migrates from the male gender to the female. Neuwirth and her co-librettist, Catherine Filloux, made the sensible decision to extend the story into the present day, so that we see Orlando in the context of the 1968 social revolutions, the end of the Cold War, and the age of the Internet. Orlando also has a child, who adopts the language of transgender activism. The dangers of resurgent fascism and environmental catastrophe do not go unnoticed. A narrator intones, “The more the world turns in a direction Orlando doesn’t want it to go, the greater the urge for her to write.”
Neuwirth, who came of age in the punk scene of the nineteen-eighties, has the virtue of extreme unpredictability, her music characterized by a controlled wildness and purposeful instability. The “Orlando” score runs the gamut from Elizabethan vocal polyphony to post-punk assault; in later scenes, a drummer, a saxophonist, an electric guitarist, and a keyboardist are wheeled onstage. The writing for diverse ensembles is brilliant throughout, but the first act feels considerably more cohesive than the second, which sometimes lapses into the style of a sweeping PBS documentary. (The voice of Winston Churchill is present on the soundtrack to a bizarre degree.) The libretto, meanwhile, loses the advantage of Woolf’s prose as it progresses into the modern period. A thought like “More stories have to be told about all of us” is welcome, but it needs more poetry in it.
Nonetheless, the world première was a startling and memorable night. The mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey gave a stupendous account of the title role, executing hyper-elegant coloratura as confidently as she did agitprop orations. Polly Graham directed with an eye toward glamorous spectacle; Rei Kawakubo, of Comme des Garçons, provided handsomely garish costumes. Matthias Pintscher, in the pit, found the connecting threads in Neuwirth’s polyglot score. Then, there was the veteran downtown-New York performer Justin Vivian Bond, who in the nineteen-nineties won cult fame as part of the slash-and-burn cabaret act Kiki and Herb. Anyone who saw that duo sow chaos in small clubs could only laugh in happy disbelief as Bond, in the role of Orlando’s child, took to the storied Vienna stage to shout, “Fuck the patriarchy!” Something had been dared, and something had changed. ♦
