It has already been a bumper year for contemporary opera. This summer has seen several major new works hit stages, including Sir George Benjamin’s Picture a Day Like This and Philip Venables’ The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions. Both appeared alongside each other at Aix-en-Provence and have done much to confirm (if there were any doubt) the significance of these artists’ contributions to modern opera.
Other notable new works aired this year have included Salvatore Sciarrino’s Venere e Adone at Hamburg, the venerable Italian’s fifteenth stage work, as well as new operas by Joby Talbot, Jake Heggie, Moritz Eggert and Jonathan Dove, amongst others. Earlier this year, we spoke to Josephine Stephenson about her debut opera at Avignon: contemporary opera, particularly in continental Europe, seems to be bouncing back healthily in the aftermath of the pandemic.
The coming year sees more major new productions. Peter Eötvös has composed thirteen stage works, but until now, none have been in his native Hungarian. He breaks this trend with the new opera Valuska, which is based on László Krasznahorkai’s surreal and otherworldly Melancholy of Resistance. The scenario concerns the arrival of a strange travelling fair, featuring a decaying stuffed whale, to a small Hungarian town – and its unsettling effect on the locals.
Adapted for the screen in characteristically mesmerising fashion by director Béla Tarr as The Werckmeister Harmonies in 2000, Krasznahorkai’s narrative is a classic of Hungarian modernism and fits ideally with Eötvös’ dramatic sensibilities. The composer spoke to us about this new work ahead of the premiere at Hungarian State Opera on 2nd December.
Two productions in early 2024 are notable for their documentary scenarios, dramatising recent real-world events with significant political and environmental implications. Justice, by composer Hèctor Parra, librettist Fiston Mwanza Mujila and director Milo Rau, dramatises a terrifying incident from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2019, when a tanker containing acid collided with a truck on a road in Katanga, killing twenty and injuring scores of others. Congolese novelist Mujila won the Etisalat Prize for his debut novel Tram 83, and director Rau has also worked in Congo: this is a creative team with intimate experience of the subject matter. Premiering at Grand Théâtre de Genève in January, this will be Hèctor Parra’s eighth opera – his is music of great sonic vibrancy and diversity.
Soon after, at Dutch National Opera from 16th March, is Ellen Reid’s new work The Shell Trial, a collaboration with directors Gable and Romy Roelofsen. The work dramatises a remarkable 2021 court case, where The Hague’s District Court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell’s head office in the city was liable for the carbon emissions of its many hundreds of worldwide subsidiaries. The first time a multinational oil company has been ordered to reduce its emissions by a court, the legal battle would be dramatised as a play, which has been latterly adapted into this opera by composer Ellen Reid and librettist Roxie Perkins.
Reid won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for her previous opera Prism, a collaboration with the same librettist. Both The Shell Trial and Justice are prominent examples of contemporary opera engaging with the environmental impact of decisions made by European states and institutions and their frequently calamitous consequences for the wider world.
Psychological opera is also well represented amongst the world premieres this season. Sébastian Rivas’ Otages at Opéra de Lyon from 16th March is to a libretto by Nina Bouraoui, from her own novel of the same name, originally written as a stage monologue. With the drama centred on a woman left alone after the breakdown of her marriage, it concerns the aftermath of domestic violence. The novel won the Anaïs Nin prize in 2020.
Bernhard Lang’s Dora, premiering at Staatsoper Stuttgart on 3rd March, has a similar psychological bent, with the protagonist – a twenty-something woman experiencing a quarter-life crisis – eventually calling on the Devil himself, a reliable operatic gambit. Lang’s obsessive, rhythmically driven and restless music works well with this kind of scenario and protagonist. Lang is a prolific composer of stage works, Dora being his nineteenth since 1990.
Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen’s work has some similarities with Lang’s in that it is frequently theatrical and informed by a wide range of stylistic influences. Fresh from his recent version of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria at Venice in 2022, his Don Giovanni’s Inferno is his largest and most ambitious stage work to date. A kind of meta-opera, it follows Mozart and Da Ponte’s protagonist as he travels, like Dante, through “opera hell”, guided by Polystopheles – an amalgam of every devil-like operatic personage in the repertoire. Steen-Andersen is frequently interested in this sort of music-about-music and this looks to be the ideal opera-about-opera. The opera’s world premiere was in Strasbourg in September, and it arrives at Royal Danish Opera in April 2024.
Other notable premieres to watch for in the new year include Detlev Glanert’s Die Jüdin von Toledo (libretto by Hans-Ulrich Treichel after Franz Grillparzer’s 1851 play) at Dresden Semperoper from 10th February. The Munich Biennale also returns for 2024, with a slew of experimental music theatre works on show from 31st May to 10th June. Later in the summer, Ondřej Adámek’s Ines, at Oper Köln in June, looks tantalising: a large-scale choral opera inspired by the Orpheus myth, with mobile groups of instrumentalists and up to 80 singers, conducted by François-Xavier Roth.
And for fans of Kraznahorkai, Eötvös’ Valuska is not even the only operatic adaptation of Melancholy of Resistance on stage this season: Marc-André Dalbavie’s Melancholie des Widerstands premieres at Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden in June.
See all our listings for upcoming opera world premieres.
