Olga Neuwirth, Orlando. Wiener Staatsoper, December 2019.

Extract

The Vienna State Opera made headlines around the world last December, boasting that it had finally commissioned a full-scale opera by a female composer. Olga Neuwirth, known for her difficult, unrestrained character (both musical and personal), was a curious and adventurous choice for the Wiener Staatsoper, the embassy of a conservative cultural landscape and gatekeeper of highbrow art. Choosing Virginia Woolf's seminal novel about a poet who lives through the ages and who one day miraculously changes sexes was a fitting choice for this maverick, whose work blurs the lines between genius – in all its anachronistic complexities – and fremdschämend, the well-established German equivalent of the facepalm, always scoring particularly high on listicles of ‘quintessential German words’.