In charmingly soft Gallic tones, Dominique Meyer, the Frenchman who has just launched his last season as Director of the Vienna State Opera, sings a quiet hymn of praise down the phone to his adopted city. Vienna, he says, has “an extraordinary relationship between its people and the opera. Music is the soul of the city and opera is at its very centre. The fire burns here; they love it.”
He has a simple wish: that his legacy after ten years at the top will be a continuation of that fine relationship. That special civic passion has kept the audiences coming, but Meyer knows it can’t be totally relied upon. He is acutely aware that an opera house has to keep questing, finding new repertoire and appealing to each new generation of music lovers. In his time in Vienna he has overseen 3,000 performances of more than 110 operas, introduced Baroque works on period instruments, played an entire Janáček cycle, presented five or six new productions every year and given the Viennese several works of startling originality by contemporary composers.
It’s a policy that seems to have worked. Last season, the Vienna State Opera sold 99% of its tickets, with sales totalling 37.7 million euros.
Now, in his final season before he moves on to head La Scala, Milan, he is particularly proud of the 21st-century material that will appear among a massive season of 54 operas. Chief among those are two world premieres by Austrian composers – Orlando, by Olga Neuwirth, and Persinette, by Albin Fries.
“Olga is a major composer, and I’m happy that we have a piece from someone with roots in the city,” he said. “Though we have yet to start rehearsals, I already think this will be a milestone in the history of the house. We are very excited about it.”
Meyer explained that it was Neuwirth’s choice to adapt Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando, which tells of a poet who changes sex.“You can’t open a newspaper today without reading about such things. It’s complicated and I think this an elegant way to speak about this topic. This is art reflecting a modern reality.”
Kate Lindsey will sing Orlando in a cast that will include Constance Hauman and Leigh Melrose, with Matthias Pintscher conducting. The Irish actress and director Fiona Shaw is billed to play the Narrator when the opera opens in December, but Meyer said that this is now in doubt, as Shaw may have accepted a new film role. Such are the everyday headaches of an opera house director, even one as experienced as Meyer, who before arriving in Vienna ran the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, the Opéra de Paris and the Opéra de Lausanne in Switzerland.
Persinette joins a long list of operas for children that have become a special feature of every season at the State Opera. Persinette is the original French title of the fairy tale that most of us know as Rapunzel. Albin Fries and librettist Miriam Mollard have created a piece that retells the tale of the girl with the long hair imprisoned in a tower. Fries won the Bartók Opera Composition Competition last year with his opera entitled Nora. Guillermo García Calvo will conduct Bryony Dwyer as Persinette, Jinxu Xiahou as the Prince, and the members of the Opera School of the State Opera. Direction is by Matthias von Stegmann.
“We always speak about the audience of the future but here we make this a reality,” said Meyer. “Children have a very sensitive approach. Unlike adults, they have no problems with contemporary music. They do not know it can be difficult! I always give composers rules. A piece should never be more than one hour in duration; that’s the limit of attention for children. And I like to have roles for children in the production because I think it gives the audience the idea that they could be doing this, too.”
In addition to the main house, the State Opera has a smaller 280-seat venue close by, which they use more than 60 times a year for children’s operas, but also for concerts, lectures and other events. Among revivals there this year is British-born Alma Deutscher’s Cinderella, which was given its premiere in Vienna in 2016, when Alma was just 11 years old. This phenomenal composer, violinist and pianist had to be persuaded to cut her two-hour-15-minute opera to the statutory hour. “I said to Alma: ‘This is far too long for children’. She replied that she thought children could listen to music for far longer than an hour. I said: ‘But you have a brain of a 20-year-old. Not all children are like you!’ We are so pleased to have her back. She’s so gifted.”