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State Opera of South Australia

Così Fan Tutte 

State Opera of South Australia
by
06 September 2024
Così Fan Tutte – the third and last of Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte’s collaborations – followed Le nozze di Figaro (Vienna, 1786) and Don Giovanni (Prague, 1787). This was a time of increased penury and loss for Wolfgang and Constanze (two children died during the writing of writing Così) but also one of almost unfathomable creativity for Mozart, who wrote his three last symphonies within a matter of weeks. ... (read more)

In the program for the première of Voss in Adelaide in 1986, David Malouf observed:

No libretto can reproduce the novel from which it is drawn. A novel, especially a great one, is itself: unique, irreplaceable. The best a libretto can do is reproduce the experience of the book in a new and radically different form, allowing the form itself to determine what the experience will be.

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Summer of the Seventeenth Doll 

State Opera South Australia
by
16 November 2020

It gives some indication of the relative youth of Australian theatre that Ray Lawler, author of the watershed 1955 play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (‘The Doll’ for short), is still alive. Ninety-nine years old, he apparently even had a hand in this production, just the second staging of Richard Mills and Peter Goldsworthy’s largely faithful operatic adaptation. Premièred by Opera Victoria in 1996, then remounted by Opera Australia two years later, the opera has not been performed since. It has now been dusted off, with minor changes made by composer–conductor Mills, by State Opera South Australia as part of its three-year ‘Lost Operas of Oz’ project. It’s a mark of Anglo-Australian culture’s immaturity, too, that it remains restless and amnesiac, almost wilfully ignorant of the past in its perpetual quest for the ‘next big thing’.   

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Madama Butterfly 

State Opera South Australia
by
18 November 2019

With certain artists – the luminaries, the abiders – it’s tempting to assign a kind of inevitability to their oeuvres. The musicals of Cole Porter, the satires of Jane Austen, the exiguous poems of T.S. Eliot have a kind of perfection that make them seem nonchalant. But here we run the risk of overlooking the sheer chanciness of most artistic careers – not to mention the false starts and tribulations.

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If any contemporary Australian novel can be said to be canonical, or perhaps even 'the great Australian novel', then it must be Tim Winton's Cloudstreet. Published in 1991, it soon acquired a devoted following and elevated Winton into the top rank of Australian writers ...

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