No opera thread yet, right?
www.guardian.co.uk/arts/n...87,00.html
ENO opens with lesbian passion
Director launches first season with all-women cast in new opera by celebrated Irish composer Gerald Barry
Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Thursday October 14, 2004
The Guardian
Lesbian love, passion and jealousy against the backdrop of a fashion studio: this is the subject of the new opera, with an all-women cast, with which English National Opera plans to open its 2005-06 season.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, to be staged in September 2005, is being completed by Ireland's most celebrated composer, Gerald Barry.
The work is based on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play of the same name, which the German writer-director made into a claustrophobic and sinister film in 1972.
Seán Doran, artistic director and chief executive of ENO, intends the opera to be a powerful statement of intent for his regime; it will mark the beginning of the first season to be fully programmed by him.
"By putting this new work at the head of the season we want to make a bold statement, and a rallying cry to our audience," he said.
He also made an ambitious commitment to stage at least two new works per season, whether formal ENO commissions or not. (Three out of five acts of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant have been commissioned by RTE, the Irish broadcaster, and discussions are underway as to whether ENO will formally commission the rest).
The second new work in the season will be a commission from Asian Dub Foundation. "There's a contrast and complementarity to the two pieces, of the sort that may be played out in future seasons," he said.
A source close to the company said that The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant had been decided on at the last minute as part-replacement for the long-expected complete performances of Wagner's Ring. A full cycle of the tetralogy has been abandoned owing to financial constraints and a cool reception for some of its individual installments, it is rumoured.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is the story of a self-obsessed fashion designer, Petra von Kant, who lives with her silent, strange, watchful servant, Marlene (a non-singing part in Barry's opera).
Petra is visited by a friend, Sidonie von Grasenabb, who introduces her to an apparently naive young woman, Katrin. Petra asks Katrin to model for her and gradually becomes obsessed by her, the power-play between the two women becoming more and more twisted and sadistic.
"The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is a love story: ecstatic, moving, gripping, obsessive, funny, heartbreaking, filled with tenderness, hatred, jealousy, compassion. It is one of Fassbinder's most powerful plays and films," said the 52-year-old composer.
"The play is a masterpiece - there's not an extraneous note in it," he said.
"It is so compact and witty. One of those tragic comedies in which, in the midst of a heartbreaking unrequited love, the loved one, Katrin, will say something, and Petra will reply by giving her a lesson in grammar - a lesson filled with hatred. It covers such a wide emotional range at any given time."
Barry has elected to set every word of the Fassbinder play to music ("It never occurred to me not to"), an unusual decision, since libretti derived from plays usually need large cuts.
However, Barry is known for producing music of hurtling, headlong speed, and the five-act opera should, he said, be around two and a half hours long. He also points to a single distinguished precedent: Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, which sets nearly every word of Maeterlinck's original drama.
Richard Jones, recently responsible for The Trojans at ENO and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at Covent Garden, will direct. Ultz, who worked with Jones on Hobson's Choice at the Young Vic, will design.
Barry's work has become increasingly familiar to British audiences. Act two of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant has already been given a concert performance in this country, at the Huddersfield contemporary music festival in 2002.
Barry was a featured composer at the Aldeburgh festival in 2000, and his second opera, The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, was given its stage premiere there two years later. Its occasionally obscene production by Nigel Lowery divided critics and audiences, one reviewer noting how it saw "poor Beauty fisted, fucked and fucked-over by all".
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