Publisert: 05. November 2010
THE NORWEGIAN OPRA
oder
DIE GEBURT DES OPRA DURCH DIE KRISE DER ZEITGENÖSSISCHEN MUSIK
The project will consist in forming and running a complete opera house which during three years will produce (at least) fifteen new ”opras”.
The composer and researcher Trond Reinholdtsen will be the dictatorial opera director, composer, main performer, director and producer, but will also invite artists to take part in different forms of collaborations unique for each production. The opra directors living-room in Gamlebyen, Oslo will function as the opera house and stage, with all the opera house’s traditional functions potentially intact, like PR-department, restaurant, programme book-publisher and workers union, where the whole structure of the institution will be artistically exploited. The opras will be very different in format, from large scenical productions and guest plays (”The Norwegian Opra on tour”), to conceptual sketches, recorded invisible operas and musical performances.
The Norwegian Opra will function as a parallel to Richard Wagners famous Festspielhaus in Bayreuth which was built exclusively to perform Wagners own operas. In our time and cultural climate there is no mad sponsor kings like Ludwig II, and contemporary music has a quite different and more marginal position in our society. The Norwegian Opra will thus be the poor mans version of Bayreuth, located in a shabby flat on the Oslo east side, with a staff and ensemble of altogether one person (but with a view to Bjørvika).
The main aim for the project will be to investigate possibilities for radical and unexpected ways of understanding opera as an artistic art genre by approaching the whole apparatus of opera as an experimental field:
- Is it possible to strenghten a kind of holistic compositional perspective in opera by refusing the traditional splitting up of the artistic process into specialized fields like composer, performer/singer, director and producer?
- What possibilities for visionary and utopian thinking can an extreme downscaling of the opera format give?
- What kind of music-theatrical results can one gain by removing the narrative of opera, or the voice, or the very scenic event?
- Is it, by establishing a ”smaller” form of opera, possible to move opera towards a more flexible, more relevant in political and social terms, and more receptive for influence from new theatre theory and contemporary art?
- And is it under these circumstances possible to approach a multimedial art genre with music as the motor, that on the one hand respects the opera tradition of great pathos, excessive emotions and Grössenwahn, and on the other hand reflects the conceptualism and critical position of contemporary art music?
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