Orlando (Opera)

Olga Neuwirth’s “Orlando,” an adaptation of Virginia Woolf that jolted a conservative opera house, received the $100,000 Grawemeyer Award.“Orlando,” the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth’s unruly and brazenly political opera adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel, which made history as the first work by a woman to be presented by the Vienna State Opera, has won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.When she learned the news — announced on Monday by the University of Louisville, which administers the award — Neuwirth, 53, was on the phone with someone else and didn’t know how to respond to a mysterious call. “I don’t know anyone from Louisville,” she said in a video interview. “I didn’t expect this at all.”It was truly a surprise in part because the award — which comes with $100,000 and a place alongside luminaries including Kaija Saariaho, Pierre Boulez and Gyorgy Kurtag — is for 2022, and “Orlando” premiered two years ago. Despite a DVD release of the production coming out this month, it was, Neuwirth said, “not on my brain anymore.”The work — a subversive blurring of genre, time and politics reflecting on how little has changed over the centuries, yet how much change is possible — jolted the generally conservative Vienna State Opera. It is also something of a milestone for the Grawemeyer, which since its inaugural award in 1985 has been given to only three other women before Neuwirth (an issue Andrew Norman called attention to when he won the 2017 prize).“‘Orlando’ is an enormous, supremely ambitious work,” Marc Satterwhite, the award’s director, said in a statement. “The libretto and multifaceted score challenge our preconceptions of gender and sexual roles and test our ideas of what opera is and is not.”Woolf’s novel, a fantastical parody of biographies, follows its forever-young protagonist through the centuries: from Orlando’s years as a favorite of Elizabeth I to the book’s publication in 1928. Appearing first as a titled man, the character suddenly becomes a woman — who later faces a comparatively frustrating life on the other side of gender politics. Sally Potter adapted the story into a wry and dreamy 1992 film, starring Tilda Swinton, that carried Orlando’s story into the late 20th century.Neuwirth’s opera goes another step further, taking the plot to the present — a world facing climate crisis, the rise of nationalism and the persistence of the patriarchy — and looking toward a better future. “It’s not kitschy, but in a way it’s hopeful,” she said in the interview. “And we need to keep that in our hearts. Otherwise hate will fill it up more and more. We are all different, but just by listening to each other we can try to create a different world.”Her “Orlando” covers several hundred years over three hours, with a score of smoothly fleeting stylistic shifts and disorientingly fuzzy instrumental distinctions — what Neuwirth has described as a kind of androgyny in sound. “I think it’s really my grand piece,” she said. “I’m in this business now for 35 years, and this brought everything together.”Neuwirth studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, then at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Art Institute. She described her time in the United States as formative; amid open-minded artistic friends and casual acquaintance with the chess legend Bobby Fischer, she thought about music in a more inclusive, genre-embracing way.“Orlando” followed other stage works, including a harrowing 2003 adaptation of David Lynch’s film “Lost Highway.” It starred the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and featured artists from outside opera — among them the cabaret legend Justin Vivian Bond as Orlando’s child and the fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, who did the costumes.Yet in bringing the production to life at the Vienna State Opera, Neuwirth said, “I had a lot of fights.” The company gave it a run of only five performances, and a revival is currently not expected. “Orlando” may have been a breakthrough for the house, but the fact that it came and went, she added, “is a sign that the system has not changed.”Neuwirth has recently faced other setbacks. Her next opera, “Manga for Lovers” — whose team includes the “Lost Highway” screenwriter Barry Gifford, the innovative director Yuval Sharon and the soprano Julia Bullock — had been planned for the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris next fall, but was canceled, with no new opening in sight. “Keyframes for a Hippogriff,” her commission for the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19 series to commemorate the 19th Amendment, was meant to premiere in June 2020 but remains delayed by the pandemic because the piece calls for a children’s choir. (It was instead first presented by the Berlin Philharmonic in September.)“I still think there are so many gifted composers out there, it feels like Russian roulette, in a positive way,” Neuwirth said of the Grawemeyer news, which follows her winning the Wolf Prize in Music earlier this year. “But after everything, and the whole story with ‘Orlando,’ it is a really wonderful sign to keep going.” More