Post Card from Australia

MAIN STAGE | Postcard from Australia

POSTCARD FROM

AUSTRALIA

By Fiona Gruber

To understand opera in Australia, it is necessary to view the country as a collection of rival city states with long and proud traditions of musical enterprise dating back to the colonial era. In the past, several state-based companies have reached for a national crown but it wasn’t until the creation of the Australian Opera Company in 1956 that a national vision was government-funded and implemented.

Sydney Opera House at dawn. Photo by Neale Cousland

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MAIN STAGE | Postcard from Australia

Early days Credit for the first operatic production in Australia goes back almost to the beginning of colonial settlement. In 1796, eight years after a penal colony was established in Sydney Cove, former housebreaker and convict Robert Sidaway opened a theatre in the Rocks and put on The Poor Soldier by William Shield, a comic opera with spoken dialogue.

By the 1830s, Sydney had a thriving theatre scene. Alongside English ballad operas, two Australian works were also performed at this time: The Currency Lass by Edward Geoghegan in 1844 (more a musical play than an opera) and Don John of Austria by Isaac Nathan in 1847.

In Tasmania, Anne Clarke founded an opera company in 1842 that included singers recruited from England, which premiered French and Italian operas in English. By the 1850s, the building of larger theatres in the major cities enabled more ambitious productions. The discovery of gold lured overseas talent to these shores: the first true international opera star to visit Australia was Irish soprano Catherine Hayes in 1854. Hayes toured to Adelaide and the Gold Fields of Victoria with its newly wealthy capital Melbourne. She was followed by another internationally renowned soprano, Anna Bishop, whose singing of Norma in Bellini’s opera was deemed unparalleled.

In the second half of the 19th century, entrepreneurs William Lyster and J C Williamson both created touring companies that delivered ambitious and professional productions. Lyster, in 1861, set up a company of seven singers recruited in the US and with orchestras and choruses raised locally. Between 1861 and 1869 his company gave more than 1,450 performances, and in 1877 Lyster introduced Wagner to Australian audiences with a production of Lohengrin.

Thereafter, J C Williamson’s company, founded by the US actor in 1878, dominated theatre and opera in Australasia for almost 100 years, specialising in large-scale productions and star-studded tours: in 1911, Williamson staged Nellie Melba’s first opera tour in her native land (born Mitchell, Dame Nellie changed her surname to honour her home town, Melbourne), following on from her international success in Europe and the US. In 1965, the J C Williamson company presented the Joan Sutherland-Williamson Grand Opera Season in Sydney, where Australian-born La Stupenda performed in five operas, including Lucia di Lammermoor and Rossini’s Semiramide and introduced Australia to a then unknown young Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti.

Opera Australia Opera Australia began life as the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, an organisation that suspended its schedule to join forces with the Sutherland-Williamson company in order to create a national opera company for the first time in Australia. During the 1970s and ’80s, Sutherland returned to sing with the national company on numerous occasions. Her husband and conductor Richard Bonynge became the company’s musical director in1977, succeeded by Moffat Oxenbould in 1984, Simone Young in 2001 and Richard Hickox in 2005. Following Hickox’s sudden death in 2008, Lyndon Terracini was appointed artistic director in 2009.

Under his charge the company has started touring more extensively.

The company changed its name to the Australian Opera Company in 1970, then re-branded itself again in 1996 as Opera Australia after absorbing the Victorian State Opera following the latter’s debt-fuelled demise. (Victorian Opera, created ten years later, is a totally distinct organisation.)

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Divas from Down Under: Dame Nellie Melba (above) and La Stupenda, Dame Joan Sutherland (below)

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Ferrying a giant chandelier across Sydney Harbour for OA’s spectacular production of La traviata. Photo by Lisa Tomasetti

OA's chandelier carrying Emma Matthews as Violetta. Photo by James Morgan

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MAIN STAGE | Postcard from Australia

Although based in Sydney with a permanent performance home at the Jørn Utzon-designed Sydney Opera House, opened in 1972, the company also has two seasons a year at Melbourne’s Arts Centre with occasional forays to other states (an infrequency that is often criticised). In May and June 2012 it had its first season in 26 years in Brisbane, Queensland, with productions of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Mozart’s Magic Flute. Its budget touring arm, Ozopera, formed in 1996, takes a fully staged opera into remote and regional areas each year (Don Giovanni is visiting New South Wales, Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia in 2012) and Ozopera’s schools company gives over 400 performances each year in schools throughout NSW and Victoria.

These days, Opera Australia has been credited with a new dynamism, and Terracini is challenging union restriction on overseas performers in Australia, which for the past 23 years have been limited to ten foreign singers a year for ten performances each.

OA’s repertoire is a mix of old and new productions of traditional works with a tendency to save its more adventurous premieres for Sydney. While the new work in the Melbourne autumn and spring 2012 seasons include crowd-pleasers such as Lucy Taymor’s Disneyesque The Magic Flute and The Merry Widow (a co-production

with Opera North), only Sydney audiences get to enjoy the Australian premiere of Erich Korngold’s 1920 opera Die tote Stadt directed by Bruce Beresford.

Alongside the year’s 11 productions, OA’s 2012 season included a spectacular La traviata on Sydney Harbour in March, sponsored

by Japanese philanthropist Haruhisa Handa. In 2013, to celebrate Wagner’s bicentenary, it’s presenting the Melbourne Ring cycle, the first OA Ring. Although first seen in Australia in 1913, the Ring wasn’t staged again until the two celebrated State Opera of South Australia productions in 1998 and 2004. OA’s Ring, presented in collaboration with Houston Grand Opera, will be directed by Neil Armfield and conducted by Richard Mills.

On the contemporary front, OA has commissioned 12 new Australian operas since 1974, including Voss by Richard Meale in 1986, Richard Mills’ Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1999) and his 2001 Batavia, Moya Henderson’s Lindy (2003) and 2010s Bliss by Brett Dean, which was also staged at the Edinburgh International Festival and Hamburg State Opera under former OA musical director Simone Young. Terracini, a populist with an avowed aim to grow the audience, recently blogged about OA’s commission of a new opera, Divorce from composer Elena Kats-Chernin, which will run as a sitcom on Australia’s SBS television company.

Opera on the Australian fringe

Alongside national and state companies numerous smaller companies proliferate, several dedicated to experimental or avant-garde work.

In Sydney, Pacific Opera concentrates on fostering young talent, Pinchgut Opera presents operas from the 17th and 18th centuries on period instruments, and Sydney Chamber Opera (the newest company founded in 2010) focuses on 20th- and 21st-century repertoire, recently giving the Australian premiere of Philip Glass’s In the Penal Colony. Melbourne City Opera and Melbourne Opera are firmly established, traditionally inspired companies, while Chamber Made Opera, founded in 1988 and also based in Melbourne, has consistently pushed the boundaries of the form with avantgarde new works, including an ongoing series of privately-commissioned and domesticallylocated ‘Living Room Operas’. In Tasmania, IHOS, an experimental opera and music theatre outfit founded in 1990, performed its latest opera, Constantine Koukias’ The Barbarians in January at the island’s extraordinary subterranean Museum of Old and New Art. There’s also now an indigenous company, Short Black Opera, the brainchild of Aboriginal soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham: the company’s first production, Pecan Summer, an opera about dispossession written and directed

by Cheetham and with an Aboriginal cast, premiered in Melbourne in September 2011.

Photo by Louis Dillon Savage

Postcolonial echoes: Sydney Chamber Opera's In the Penal Colony (right, above) and Short Black Opera's Pecan Summer (right, below)

Photo by Jorge de Araujo

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MAIN STAGE | Postcard from Australia

Andrew Jones as Papageno in Julie Taymor’s Disneyesque Magic Flute at Opera Australia. Photo by Branco Gaica

The State Companies Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia have vigorous State companies which often produce edgier work and commission more new operas than the national company. They have also all acquired new artistic directors in the past year, with Tim Sexton’s appointment in 2011 as artistic director of the State Opera of South Australia; Lindy Hume as the new artistic director of Queensland Opera; Richard Mills moving across from West Australia Opera to replace Richard Gill at Victorian Opera; and Mills’ replacement, Joseph Colaneri, flying into Perth from his position as director of the opera programme at New York’s Mannes College.

Many of Australia’s States have traditions of highly professional companies and the current crop of partially government-funded organisations have often absorbed or risen from the ashes of illustrious predecessors.

Brisbane-based Opera Queensland, founded in 1981, the country’s second largest opera company after OA, presents three major productions a year in the 2,100 seat Lyric Theatre with smaller works in the 650-seat Conservatorium. It has premiered several new works in its history including, in 2007, Richard Mills’ The Love of the Nightingale, a co-production with Victorian Opera and West Australian Opera. The 2012 season includes Carmen, The Mikado and a concert performance of Verdi’s Macbeth. In a Three Valkyries in the State Opera of South Australia’s ground-breaking Ring.

Photo by Sue Adler

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West Australian Opera's Elektra starring Eva Johansson. Photo James Rogers

politically unpopular move, OQ was forced to move its season’s dates to accommodate OA’s expanded touring schedule.

Victorian Opera, in Melbourne, was founded in 1996 under Richard Gill and has a strong reputation as a commissioner of new works alongside fresh productions of established repertoire.The 2012 season of six productions includes The Rake’s Progress, The Marriage of Figaro, the world premiere of Midnight Son by Gordon Kerry and Louis Nowra, and a double bill of two shorter works: Master Peter’s Puppet Show, a reworking of Manuel de Falla’s 1920s Quixotic opera, and What Next? by Elliott Carter. It has several venue partners.

La bohème (Gale Edward’s 2011 production for OA), Orpheus in the Underworld and Fidelio make up the State Opera of South Australia’s 2012 season at Adelaide’s Festival Theatre. The company, founded in 1976, has chalked up several firsts alongside its celebrated Ring cycles, including the 2010 world premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby Dick (co-produced with several US companies) and the Australian premiere of Ligeti’s Le grande macabre at the 2010 Adelaide Arts Festival.

West Australian Opera, founded in 1967, presents three operas a year at His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth alongside a summer offering in the Supreme Court Gardens.This year’s offering, Richard Mills’ last as artistic director, includes Elektra (a co-pro with the Perth International Arts Festival and Opera Australia and with soprano Eva Johansson), Lucia di Lammamoor, Madama Butterfly and The Tales of Hoffmann.

Opera Queensland’s world premiere production of The Love of the Nightingale

by Richard Mills. Photo by Rob Maccoll

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