Austrian politician Jörg Haider labelled her work as Weltkatzenmusik. When his far-right Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs joined the government in 2000, this led to mass protests. At one such rally, Olga Neuwirth (Graz, 1968), under the title 'Ich lass mich nicht wegjodeln', denounced his anti-intellectual and anti-cultural agenda. The rest is history: Haider drove himself to pieces in 2008, Neuwirth is still going strong and is internationally regarded as one of the most important composers of her generation. She is this year focus composer of the Holland Festival.
Neuwirth grew up in an artistic and progressive milieu, with a well-known jazz pianist and piano teacher as her father, a literary inspired woman as her mother and an avant-garde composer as her uncle. In her in her own words 'hippie-like' family, it was a coming and going of artists and musicians, including many Afro-American jazz greats. When she was 12, she wrote a play about this, which was performed in the school theatre as well.
Play with identities
All this sounds more idyllic than it was, because the downside of her parents' freedom-joy mentality was that as a child she was 'dragged everywhere and randomly put to sleep somewhere', as she recounted in an interview in 2015. Moreover, her parents and their friends constantly moved 'on the brink of self-destruction', so as an adolescent she had the paradoxical feeling of having to save them from destruction. 'You get to know a lot of human abysses in the process,' she explained in the same article.
From an early age, the early-adult Olga Neuwirth fearlessly follows her wayward path. Daring to take a stand and row against the tide, she has spent much time with controversial Austrian star author Elfride Jelinek; like this Nobel Prize winner, she too fervently advocates the cause of women. That she is socially engaged, likes to scrutinise our darkest motivations and is fascinated by shifting identities almost seems obvious.
As early as her 22e she overwhelms new-music audiences with Jelinek's text-inspired mini-operas Der Wald and Körperliche Veränderungen. The first is an indictment of environmental pollution, in which she introduces a forest as the acting character. In the black-comic Körperliche Veränderungen the pomposity of men is ridiculed: traditional authority relations remain intact even after Tarzan and Jane change voices ánd roles.
Bloody opera Bählamms Fest
In 1999, Neuwirth broke through internationally with her 'animated opera' also based on a libretto by Jelinek Bählamms Fest, in which a family goes at each other in gruesome ways. Main character Theodora begins an affair with her brother-in-law, half wolf, half human. Her lover makes several bloody victims before abandoning her. That Theodora does not go mad after this, or desperately throw herself off the rocks, can be seen as Neuwirth's raised middle finger to mainstream operatic practice.
Like many of her peers, Neuwirth often works with electronics and video. One of her first projects is Canon of Funny Phases, which she made with her sister Flora in 1989. A one-minute animated film is shown in immediate succession on 16 different video screens, like a strict musical canon. For the renowned Quay Brothers, she composed music for a Coca Cola commercial in 1993. After the company rejected it as "harmful to youth", the Brothers used it for their animated film The Calligrapher. - Incidentally, the British duo is signing in this Holland Festival for the design of the opera Theatre of the World By Louis Andriessen.
Man versus machine
In 2003, Neuwirth throws high praise with her 'video opera' Lost Highway, after David Lynch's film of the same name, for which again Jelinek provides the lyrics. Five years later, she composed Kloing! for pianist and interactive video, in which she intersects existing (cartoon) film footage with live recordings from the stage. In this tragicomic piece, a pianist battles a computer, which controls the keys of his instrument and ends up making playing completely impossible for him. Italian pianist Marino Formenti presented the Dutch premiere at the City Theatre.
On Sunday 19 June at the Bimhuis, bassoonist Patrick Gallois will play the specially composed Torsion, for bassoon solo and tape. This piece was inspired by the Daniel Libeskind-designed new building for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Five vertical concrete shafts symbolise the void created by the Endlösungspolitik of the Nazis. Neuwirth made sound recordings in the five abandoned rooms, which cut through at as many moments in the bassoonist's dizzyingly virtuosic argument.
A day earlier, Saturday 18 June, Ensemble Intercontemporain will perform the pièce de résistance: Le Encantadas. Neuwirth completed this full-length work for six spatially arranged ensemble groups, samples and live electronics in 2015. It is named after Herman Melville's novella of the same name. It comprises ten philosophical 'sketches' of the Galapagos archipelago, describing both their immense beauty and their desolate inhospitality.
In search of the unfathomably deep sea, Neuwirth went to Venice, where at 16 she heard the premiere of Prometeo, by her inspirer Luigi Nono. In this 'tragedy of listening' (also performed at the Gashouder during the 2014 Holland Festival), the listener is surrounded by singers and musicians, whose sounds are processed electronically. The world premiere in 1984 made an indelible impression on the young Neuwirth.
San Lorenzo is now closed to the public, but when Neuwirth accidentally did manage to enter the church in 1997, she was so struck by its special acoustics that she decided to preserve it. By way of 'acoustic preservation', she and a technician recorded the acoustic relationships in a computer programme. This allows her to transfer them to other spaces, such as now the Amsterdam Gashouder.
Le Encantadas is an imaginary, over-seventy-minute musical journey through several islands. The acoustics are electronically manipulated so that sometimes we imagine ourselves in the middle of the immense space of the San Lorenzo, other times in a stuffy back room. Neuwirth also weaves recordings of splashing water, church bells ringing, people talking and even an aria by Japanese cyber diva Hatsune Miku through her discourse. This creates diverse listening experiences, which the composer himself describes as "a fictional adventure novel".
The alienating sound world Neuwirth presents us with in Le Encantadas is enchanting and compelling to some, perhaps to others Weltkatzenmusik.
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