Everest (opera)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Opera dates
Title: Everest
Summit pyramid of Everest from the southwest

Summit pyramid of Everest from the southwest

Shape: Opera in one act
Original language: English
Music: Joby Talbot
Libretto : Gene Scheer
Premiere: January 30, 2015
Place of premiere: Dallas Opera
Playing time: approx. 1 ¼ hours
Place and time of the action: Mount Everest ,
10-11. May 1996
people

Everest is a one- act opera by Joby Talbot (music) with a libretto by Gene Scheer . It was composed in 2014 and premiered on January 30, 2015 at the Margot & Bill Winspear Opera House of the Dallas Opera . The content covers the 1996 Mount Everest disaster .

action

The opera will be played on May 10th and 11th, 1996. Due to the bad weather, several expeditions are trying to reach the summit of Everest at the same time. Due to a bottleneck at Hillary Step , the ascent of Rob Hall's group is delayed . This leads his client Doug Hansen, who had already failed on the mountain last year, to the summit despite the timeline being exceeded. Another member of his group, the pathologist Beck Weathers , is already severely weakened. Because his eyes are troubling him, he has given up and is waiting for the two of them to return.

1. Prologue: “Is this how it ends?” (Prologue: “Is this the end?”). At the beginning only the crackling of the shortwave receiver can be heard. As the orchestra slowly sets in, the heights of Everest gradually appear in the fog. Beck lies unconscious in a snowdrift . The chorus of the Everest dead wonders if these are its last breaths.

2. Everest Summit - 2.30 pm (Everest Summit - 2.30 pm). Rob reaches the top and enjoys the beauty of the mountain. He wants to follow the other members of his group who have already begun the descent as soon as Doug has reached the goal. The choir reminds us of how dying begins - every second counts up here as light and oxygen are limited.

3. Beck's barbecue . Beck wakes up. He realizes that he has lost a glove. The choir urges him to leave immediately. He's hallucinating about a barbecue with his little daughter Meg.

4. Doug's ascent . Rob helps the exhausted Doug take the final steps to the top. The choir reminds of the passage of time. Doug gathers his last strength. He thinks about his motivation for the tour (aria: "One more step"). Rob takes a picture.

5. Photos of January (photos by Jan). A flashback shows Rob's wife Jan in her colonial home in New Zealand. They take souvenir photos. Jan has also climbed Everest as a doctor on a joint expedition. This time she couldn't travel because of her pregnancy. She remembers how Ruth Mallory waited in vain for her husband George to return in 1924 . The flashback ends. Doug has difficulty breathing and needs Rob's help.

6. Doug collapes . At 4:15 p.m. Rob urges them to leave. But Doug is too weak for relegation. Rob tries in vain to reach base camp by radio for help and oxygen.

7. Beck clicks out of the line (Beck releases the rope). Beck hallucinates again. You can see Meg jumping rope. Beck stares at the rope without noticing his daughter. Even when she speaks to him directly, he doesn't recognize her. He takes the rope and straps onto it. Somewhat conscious again, he realizes that Rob and Doug are overdue. He hardly understands why this expedition was so important to him that he left his wife and children behind for it. Still, this is where he wants to be. The choir repeats its thoughts like an echo. It's starting to snow and sunset is imminent. Mike Groom, another member of the expedition, finds him and urges them to descend, as they can no longer wait for Rob and Doug. He starts rappelling Beck down. A storm breaks out.

8. The storm hits . During the storm, Jan can be seen talking on the phone with the base camp. She realizes that the situation is critical for her husband. Rob also tries to get help from the camp. Guy Cotter finally answers, but he can't give him any hope. Rob's only chance is to leave Doug behind. Nevertheless, Rob makes an attempt to overcome the Hillary Step with Doug. The storm is now reaching its greatest strength. The choir watches their efforts while Jan hopes on the phone that her husband will hold out.

9. The huddle . The members of the expedition, crowded together in the storm, receive the confused Beck. He can no longer distinguish between individuals in the crowd and believes that he can see the organelles on the microscope slides in the different colors of their suits during his work as a pathologist. While Jan waits for the next call, Rob continues to try to get Doug down the Hillary Step. All four recognize how close death is (quartet: “Too easy to die”, Allegro dondolante ).

10. The south summit . Rob rappels Doug onto a small ledge, where it collapses immediately. Rob climbs laboriously behind and tries to secure her position. When he's finished, he realizes that Doug is dead. He reports to the base camp by radio and informs Guy about the situation. He wants to try to hold out until the next day. Guy informs him that they want to establish a direct connection with Jan via the satellite phone. Rob asks to send help to him the next morning. The choir repeats its words like an echo.

11. The phone call . The choir announces the time: 2 a.m. Rob's end is near. One after the other, the members of the expedition set off. They leave Beck, whom they already believe to be dead, unconscious. The telephone connection between Rob and Jan, however, works. The two agree on the name "Sarah" for their unborn child and ensure their love.

12. The cavalry's not coming . The choir members gather around Rob and Doug to accept them into their fellowship of the dead. Jan's last words don't reach Rob anymore. While a projector shows the names of those who have died on Everest so far, the choir enumerates the various causes for their death. Bob and Doug join their singing. Beck hallucinates how his daughter calls to him in the distance. He realizes that he has to dare to descend alone to save himself. No help will come. With the last of his strength he reached the camp.

layout

The plot is not told linearly, but is made up of individual report fragments and flashbacks. In addition, the choir repeatedly interjects in the form of comments, questions, echoes or times. At the end of the opera it becomes clear that the choir is made up of the souls of the many victims of the mountain who are waiting for "another name". The motivation of the mountaineers always remains in the dark. In this way, the authors avoided developing a kind of "heroic epic". The action does not take place in real time, but relates to the perception of the climbers.

The music sounds contemporary modern, but is based on traditional harmony and is emotionally designed. The orchestral tone fabric ties in with minimal music according to John Adams . At the same time there are references to Giacomo Puccini , Leonard Bernstein , Benjamin Britten or Igor Stravinsky . There are numerous sound effects due to the large drums and the electronics, for example the crackling of the shortwave receiver, the radio conversations of the climbers or the howling of the wind. One focus is on the rhythm and the spectrum of timbres. The orchestra plays a major role overall. The mountain itself has its own voice, which is mainly generated by the low winds and the percussion. Talbot got his inspiration for this from the slow, cracking movements of glacier masses over the bedrock. Yet there are also moments of euphoria. When Rob desperately tries to reach the base camp after Doug's death ("Can anyone hear me?"), The orchestra falls completely silent. At this point the listener already knows that Rob will also die.

In the vocal parts, Talbot refers to traditional forms by using indications such as “aria” or “quartet”. In addition, there are surprisingly some elements of dance music that were particularly considered in the Hagen production of 2018. The emotional climax of the opera is Rob's last phone conversation with his pregnant wife Jan, in which both of them (unspoken) realize that Rob will not survive. Here too, orchestral accompaniment is reduced to a minimum.

orchestra

The orchestral line-up for the opera includes the following instruments:

Work history

The opera Everest by the English composer Joby Talbot, who is best known for film music, was commissioned by the Dallas Opera . Talbot composed it in 2014. The libretto by Gene Sheer deals with a real occurrence, the accident on Mount Everest in 1996 , in which several mountaineers were killed after a weather change. It is based on interviews with survivors and shows in two storylines the slow death of Rob Hall and Doug Hansen and the emotional world of Beck Weathers , who - already weakened - had been left behind and could be saved with severe frostbite.

At the world premiere on January 30, 2015 at the Margot & Bill Winspear Opera House in Dallas, Sasha Cooke (Jan Arnold), Julia Rose Arduino (Meg Weathers), Andrew Bidlack (Rob Hall), Craig Verm (Doug Hansen), Kevin Burdette ( Beck Weathers), John Boehr (Guy Cotter) and Mark McCrory (Mike Groom). Nicole Paiement was the musical director . The production was by Leonard Foglia , the stage by Robert Brill and the costumes by David C. Woolard.

On May 5, 2017, on the occasion of the Opera America Conference 2017, there was a concert performance in the Winspear Opera House under the direction of Emmanuel Villaume . In November 2017, the opera was performed by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

The European premiere took place on May 5, 2018 in the Theater Hagen in a production by Johannes Erath under the direction of Joseph Trafton . Kaspar Glarner designed the stage and costumes . Veronika Haller (Jan Arnold), Musa Nkuna (Rob Hall), Kenneth Maltice (Doug Hansen) and Morgan Moody (Beck Weathers) sang the leading roles. Instead of realistically depicting the mountain world, the dramaturge Corinna Jarosch tried to "make the hallucinations of the mountaineers visible". The plot was moved to a mountain sanatorium based on the novel The Magic Mountain . There the choir, which was still commenting outside the plot in the premiere production, took on the role of the sick and staged the psychological conflicts of the main characters. Another point of reference was mentioned that the novel was also referenced in the opera only three months after and also fatal first ascent attempt by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine in 1924.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Rudolf Hermes: Must have seen ... Review of the performance in Hagen 2018. In: Der Opernfreund , May 6, 2018, accessed on July 6, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Heidi Waleson, Marc Staudacher (translation): Fragments of Despair. Review of the world premiere in Dallas 2015. In: Opernwelt from March 2015, p. 44.
  3. ^ A b Corinna Jarosch: Joby Talbot: Telling stories with music. In: Theater Hagen : Everest. Program No. 10, 2017/2018 season, pp. 9-10.
  4. ^ A b Fred Cohn: Everest & La Wally. Review of the 2015 world premiere in Dallas. In: Operanews, January 30, 2015, accessed July 6, 2018.
  5. ↑ a b Andreas Falentin: Magic Mountain. Review of the performance in Hagen 2018. In: Die Deutsche Bühne on May 7, 2018, accessed on July 6, 2018.
  6. ↑ a b c Francis Hüsers: A mountain as a metaphor - Everest in Hagen. In: Theater Hagen : Everest. Program No. 10, 2017/2018 season, pp. 11–13.
  7. ↑ a b c d e work information from Music Sales Classical, accessed on July 6, 2018.
  8. ↑ Information in the score.
  9. ^ Theater Hagen : Everest. Program No. 10, season 2017/2018.
  10. ↑ Yvonne Hinz: Opera "Everest" leaves theatergoers in Hagen shivering. Announcement of the performance in Hagen 2018. In: Westfalenpost , April 28, 2018, accessed on July 7, 2018.
  11. ↑ Uwe Schweikert : Fight against the fall. Review of the performance in Hagen 2018. In: Opernwelt from July 2018, p. 71.