The One About the Opera at the Planetarium
Composer Tawnie Olson and conductor Arianne Abela discuss 'Sanctuary & Storm' and the state of women in opera
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Ashley Daniel Foot:
It's Inside Vancouver Opera. My name is Ashley Daniel Foot. Today we are talking about Sanctuary & Storm, our new collaboration with re:Naissance Opera and the H.R MacMillan Space Centre from November 17th to 19th. Tickets are already going very quickly, so be sure to head to VancouverOpera.ca to grab your tickets. Sanctuary & Storm is truly an unusual creation that imagines a conversation that took place between medieval luminaries, Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Today we were honoured to speak with composer Tawnie Olson and conductor Arianne Abela. In our conversation, you'll hear how this opera explores the way that we respond to power and seek liberation. I hope you enjoy some of the insights that Arianne and Tawnie share, especially as we discuss the shamefully low number of female identifying composers and conductors that are actually represented in our art form.
Tawnie, how on earth did this project get started for you? Right back to the beginning.
Tawnie Olson:
The beginning was in 2017, I believe. Debi Wong and Arianne Abela had decided to form re:Naissance Opera. And they reached out to me because they wanted to do some kind of opera involving Hildegard of Bingen and multimedia. They were contemplating different librettists, and I happen to have a dear friend, Roberta Barker, who is a dramaturge. She's directed operas. She directs a lot of plays. She teaches at Dalhousie University, and she and I had always talked about doing an opera together.
So we brainstormed a bunch of different ideas. I went to Toronto to stay in an Anglican convent for a couple of days because I was sort of half thinking, well, if I'm going to write about Hildegard, maybe I should write part of it in a convent. But anyway, I stayed there a couple of days. And while I was there, I started doing a little bit of research. I discovered this letter of Hildegard's that she'd written to Eleanor of Aquitaine, and I immediately got excited because Roberta is a huge fan of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her mother Diane, who the opera is dedicated to, was obsessed with Eleanor of Aquitaine and sort of passed that enthusiasm along to Roberta. So I said, Berta, could we maybe do something with this? And the rest is libretto history, because she ran with that and came up with pretty close to the libretto that we have now.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
Arianne, tell us a little bit about your role in the opera as a conductor and how you interpret the score and we'll bring it to life.
Arianne Abela:
It's such a cool score. Tawnie is an amazing composer. I've admired Tawnie's work for so many years now. I think we've known each other for 15-something years, and so I've always been in love with Tawnie's music.
When Debi and I were looking to promote and do more women's repertoire in opera, of course, Tawnie, because your music is so amazing. For me, there is the difficulty of a lot of meter changes and tempos, and so that's my big challenge is navigating that and keeping it together. So for a lot of the piece, it's really just being that metronome and really being really clear and helping everybody stay together, and really letting the singers especially lead the way.
There are a lot of moments that are doubled with the singers, and so balancing that, making sure that the singers are heard over that and that everyone's really connecting in a way, it's so much more intimate than having a really large orchestra because here you have, if it is the clarinets playing or viola altogether, at the same time, they have to sound like the singer and really have the nuance of the text in their minds as they play their parts. It's much more intimate in that way.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
Tell us a little bit about Hildegard and Eleanor. Who were they?
Tawnie Olson:
Hildegard of Bingen was an abbess. Her family gave her as a sort of tithe to the church. She was the tenth child, and so they decided when she was a little girl that she was going to be a nun. And she moreover lived as an anchoress initially, which was a very intense form of monasticism.
She ended up sort of leading a community of nuns, but we know that she wrote incredible music.
And she was very sought after for spiritual and temporal advice. All kinds of people wrote to her. And it appears that Eleanor of Aquitaine was one of those people. And we don't have Eleanor's letter. I don't believe we actually have any of Eleanor's writings, which is kind of tragic. But we do have Hildegard's reply.
Eleanor of Aquitaine sort of came at life from the opposite perspective, She was Duchess of Aquitaine when she was 13 years-old and got married off to the King of France within the year, and it was not a great marriage. He was very religious and she was really not religious. She managed to get their marriage annulled. So after the annulment, she married this young guy named Henry from England who ends up being Henry II King of England eventually.
Unfortunately, this is not a happy marriage either. After their sons are a little bit older, Henry decides that maybe he should be the boss of everything and everyone. So obviously Eleanor was not going to have this.
So the action of the opera takes place because given Hildegard's response, Roberta inferred that most likely what had happened was that Eleanor of Aquitaine wrote to Hildegard and was like, “look, here's the deal my husband is doing all this bad stuff. He's trying to be a tyrant. He's taking away my power. He's taking away our children's inheritance. What do you think I should do?” That is the question she poses towards the start of the opera, because in our opera, instead of writing to each other, we imagine that they actually saw each other in person because that just is more operatic.
So she asks this question, Hildegard responds with the words of the letter, which are somewhat more of the turn the other cheek, trust in God kind of response. And you can imagine how Eleanor took that. The conversation continues in the opera. But interestingly, Hildegard did also write to Henry II, and in very poetic, figurative language sort of said, “Henry, do not be a tyrant. It's a bad idea. Just don't do this.”
So the opera kind of takes this question of, well, how do you respond to tyranny? How do you react when people in power are doing the wrong thing? Hildegard and Eleanor have this fiery debate that gets very personal.
But ultimately, thanks to the intervention of Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, who's the third character in the opera, they kind of come to realize that actually they want the same thing. They just view the world in such a totally different way that they have a really different approach to trying to make the world a better place.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
When you look at the stats of women in opera, the numbers are not good. Can we talk a little bit about that and how works like this and bringing the creative team that you have together can start to address those terrible numbers to improve them and change them.
Arianne Abela:
Even six years ago, Debi and I had already been thinking about how women need to have more of a presence in an opera, and in conducting, in composition. And we felt like a really amazing, powerful team of women when Tawnie, Roberta, Debi, and I would have our Zoom calls. And it felt really great to sort of say, we have control over this project and we're going to see it through. And it felt really, really nice to have that because it really felt rare. So I do think that this is amazing. And I think here we are seeing not a damsel in distress, we're seeing two of the strongest women facing each other and thinking and going through many different emotions, and we're able to watch that process very freely.
And it's a very unique opera in that sense. So it's not just an interaction between a woman and a man like we see in most opera. It really is about two women, their identities, and who they are in history, and I think that's really powerful in itself. So I do think that this is going to stand out as a piece of music and a production that hopefully will lead the way into more opportunities for women and that kind of storytelling.
Tawnie Olson:
I think it's really cool that, from the beginning, Debi and Arianne were interested not only in involving a female composer, librettist, but they're also thinking about having a woman identifying team because people who identify as women are so underrepresented in all aspects of the opera world. It's not just the composers or the conductors, it's everybody. So I thought that was a really great vision. And I feel like this is a good moment to give a shout-out to Opera America because one of the reasons this opera exists at all was that way back in 2017, before I'd written a single note, we were awarded an Opera America Virginia B. Toulmin Discovery Grant. And those grants came about because Opera America stepped back and looked at their own pattern of commissioning and supporting operas and realized that it was a lot of dudes, not a lot of women.
So they created this program for women identifying composers to get money, not a commission fee, but money to workshop their works in progress. And so it was just having people being really intentional and deciding that they weren't just going to go with the status quo. But the other thing to remember is that not every attempt to get this opera off the ground was successful. Not every door we knocked on opened. There were a lot of knocks on a lot of doors that stayed very firmly shut. We didn't stop and say, I guess this is not going to happen. Each of us kept knocking and kept advocating and kept applying for things, and we're just really determined to make this happen. At the end of the day, that sort of feminist mission just is woven through this project from the beginning to the end and is sort of inseparable from the final opera that I hope people will come and see.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
Once again, when we look at the stats and Opera America helpfully releases them every year of the number of women that are at the podium, it is not really improving. What can we actually do to make that number improve? Where does that start?
Arianne Abela:
I've been thinking a lot about this, and it really does start young. We need to encourage people at a really young age that they are capable of being leaders. And I think that so many young girls end up feeling like that's not their place. And I think that just has to change. That narrative needs to change in order for it to change at the podium. I have had so many instances on the podium where men have made a comment about my height or said things to me about who I am, and things that I know that they wouldn't say to male conductors. And I've had to endure that, and I know that I'm not alone in that. It's just kind of a difficult place to be. I think it needs to change down in the education systems and in the schools where people say, you can do this.
You can be whatever you want to be. You can be a conductor, you can wave your arms and people will listen to you. You have a voice, you can be heard. Once we change that narrative, I think then we'll see more. And slowly but surely, I do think I see a little bit more. And yeah, it was a lonely place and I've been in a lot of places where I was the only female conductor, and that's okay. Actually, it felt kind of good to sort of say, I can do what you do, but maybe even better sometimes.
Ashley Daniel Foot:
Be sure to get your tickets to Sanctuary & Storm from November 17th to 19th at the H.R MacMillan Space Centre. Get your tickets at VancouverOpera.ca. Thanks to composer Tawnie Olson and conductor Arianne Abela. And as always, a tip of the hat to our audio producer, Mack McGillivray. And I'll see you at the Space Centre for the opera.
Arianne Abela is Music Director for re:Naissance Opera, Artistic Director for the Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble, and Director of the Choral Program at Amherst College. Arianne sings in ensembles across the United States and Canada and has guest conducted opera productions with various Michigan-based opera companies including Detroit's OperaMODO. Prior to her time in Detroit, Abela lived in Connecticut where she served on faculty at Wesleyan University, Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. Originally from the San Francisco, bay area, Arianne received her doctorate in conducting from the University of Michigan, holds a master’s degree in choral conducting from Yale University, and bachelor of arts from Smith College.
Tawnie Olson has been performed by a wide range of ensembles and individual musicians, including the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, the Land’s End Ensemble, Duo Fiolûtröniq, Parthenia, New Morse Code, the Wanmu Percussion Trio, the McGill, University of Calgary, and University of Toronto Percussion Ensembles, the Canadian Chamber Choir, the Toronto Chamber Choir, the Guelph Chamber Choir, the choir of Trinity Wall Street, the Norfolk Festival Choir, the Yale Camerata, and NOTUS: Indiana University Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. She has won awards from the SOCAN foundation and the Guelph Chamber Choir/Musica Viva, and is a two-time semifinalist in the Sorel Foundation competition. Olson holds a doctorate in music composition from the University of Toronto, a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music, an Artist Diploma from the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale, and a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Calgary.
Inside Vancouver Opera is hosted by Ashley Daniel Foot, Vancouver Opera’s Director of Engagement and Civic Practice. Boundlessly creative and fascinated by the way that art is created and presented, Ashley has guided arts organizations across Canada to craft messages and tell unique stories. At Vancouver Opera, Ashley carefully develops all programming that takes place off the mainstage and looks for unique and unexpected ways to highlight the power of opera in the community. He also manages all education, community partnerships, and guides the company’s commitment to justice, equity, reconciliation, and diversity. He’s particularly proud of his recent collaborations with with the Vancouver Public Library, BC Alliance for Arts and Culture, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Rumble Theatre. He is also the co-chair of the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee.
Credits
Ashley Daniel Foot - Host
Tawnie Olson - Guest and Composer of Sanctuary & Storm
Arianne Abela - Guest and Conductor for Sanctuary & Storm
Mack McGillivray - Audio Producer