The Opera Workshop - insight session no. 3

Bregenz, 4.3.16. Who was Virginia Woolf, whose novel To the Lighthouse is being transformed into an opera by Greek composer Zesses Seglias? His collaborator on this music theatre project, the librettist and stage director Ernst Marianne Binder, painted a fascinating portrait of the acclaimed author at insight session no. 3 at Kunsthaus Bregenz. His talk focused on Woolf's complex language, many-layered narrative style and her troubled biography, and also described the challenges and pitfalls of turning To the Lighthouse into a libretto. As an interlude in Binder's talk, the Cavatina from Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet op. 130 was performed by members of the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra – Karin-Regina Florey, Markus Kessler, Monika Baziger and Detlef Mielke. This was the music Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard chose for their funeral.

Death also loomed large in Zesses Seglias's string quartet, which received its premiere performance later on in the session. The quartet, only a few minutes long, contains the musical material for the second part of his opera, which deals among other things with the death of the protagonist Mrs Ramsay. Part Two, the shortest of the novel's and the opera's three parts, covers the longest time-span in the story, namely ten years. After the premiere the composer, in conversation with the festival's dramaturge Olaf A. Schmitt, explained how he used lingering sounds to evoke the continuum of time, while circling figures and eruptive episodes were interspersed in this to represent the progress of the seasons. Some passages excerpted from the string quartet demonstrated how Seglias had integrated individual moments from Beethoven's Cavatina into his own composition as "spectral shadows". At the end of the evening the new piece was performed once again in its entirety.

The Opera Workshop session, like the two that preceded it, provided an intriguing insight into further aspects of creating a brand-new piece of music theatre. The audience was able to experience first-hand the intensive creative process between the artists involved in the project. At this session the composer and librettist-cum-director were joined by artist Jakob Kolding, who has been brought in by Kunsthaus Bregenz to produce stage designs for the opera. In addition, new collaborators were introduced: conductor Claire Levacher and costume designer Vibeke Andersen, who will both be returning to the Opera Workshop at future sessions in the run-up to the opera's premiere at the 2017 Bregenz Festival. Insight session no. 4 on 10 August will be a concert at the Kunsthaus featuring music from various epochs and illuminating composer Zesses Seglias's musical universe.

SHORT BIOS

The Greek composer Zesses Seglias studied in Thessaloniki (Greece) under Dimitris Papageorgiou and in Graz (Austria) under Beat Furrer. His works have been performed by the chamber orchestra Klangforum Wien and the Diotima Quartet. In 2014, his first chamber opera hystéra was premiered at Graz Opera.

The author, musician and stage director Ernst Marianne Binder has written many plays and prose texts. From 1987 to 2003 he was artistic director of the Forum Stadtpark Graz, and has directed the theatre dramagraz since 2003. From 1995 to 2003, as house director at Mecklenburg Theatre in Schwerin, Binder staged premiere productions of a number of plays by Einar Schleef.

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