| Lost Highway | |
|---|---|
| Opera by Olga Neuwirth | |
| Librettist | Elfriede Jelinek |
| Language | English |
| Based on | David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway |
| Premiere | 2003 |
Lost Highway is a 2003 opera adaptation of the 1997 David Lynch film of the same name, by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth with the libretto by 2004 Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek.
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, painter, musician, actor, and photographer. He has been described by The Guardian as "the most important director of this era", while AllMovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking". His films Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are widely regarded by critics as among the greatest films of their respective decades, while the success of his 1990–91 television series Twin Peaks led to him being labeled "the first popular Surrealist" by film critic Pauline Kael. A recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 2019, he has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, and has won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film twice, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival.
Lost Highway is a 1997 neo-noir film directed by David Lynch and co-written by Lynch and Barry Gifford. It stars Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, and Robert Blake. The film follows a musician (Pullman) who begins receiving mysterious VHS tapes of him and his wife (Arquette) in their home, and who is suddenly convicted of murder, after which he inexplicably disappears and is replaced by a young mechanic (Getty) leading a different life.
Austria, officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in Central Europe comprising nine federated states. Its capital, largest city and one of nine states is Vienna. Austria has an area of 83,879 km2 (32,386 sq mi), a population of nearly nine million people and a nominal GDP of $477 billion. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Hungary and Slovakia to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The terrain is landlocked and highly mountainous, lying within the Alps; only 32% of the country is below 500 m (1,640 ft), and its highest point is 3,798 m (12,461 ft). The majority of the population speaks local Bavarian dialects as their native language, and German in its standard form is the country's official language. Other regional languages are Hungarian, Burgenland Croatian, and Slovene.
The opera was premiered in Graz in 2003 at the Steirischer Herbst Festival of New Music with the live-electronics and sound design realized at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) using the open source software Pure Data, [1] [2] conducted by Johannes Kalitzke. [3]
Graz is the capital city of Styria and the second-largest city in Austria after Vienna. On 1 January 2019, it had a population of 328,276. In 2015, the population of the Graz larger urban zone who had principal residence status stood at 633,168. Graz has a long tradition as seat of universities: its six universities have almost 60,000 students. Its historic centre is one of the best-preserved city centres in Central Europe.
The Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) is a multidisciplinary research center within the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, (Austria).
Pure Data (Pd) is a visual programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works. While Puckette is the main author of the program, Pd is an open-source project with a large developer base working on new extensions. It is released under a license similar to the BSD license. It runs on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, Android and Windows. Ports exist for FreeBSD and IRIX.
It made its American premiere at Finney Chapel in Oberlin, Ohio, and at the Miller Theater in New York City in February 2007, in a production performed by students from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. It was directed by Jonathon Field, with sound design by Tom Lopez, produced by Lewis Nielson, and set design by Scott Dane Knowles. Barry Bryan portrayed Fred Madison. [4]
Oberlin is a city in Lorain County, Ohio, United States, southwest of Cleveland. Oberlin is the home of Oberlin College, a liberal arts college and music conservatory with approximately 3,000 students.
The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2018 population of 8,398,748 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 19,979,477 people in its 2018 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 22,679,948 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
The Oberlin Conservatory of Music, located on the campus of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, was founded in 1865 and is the second oldest conservatory and oldest continually operating conservatory in the United States. Students of Oberlin Conservatory enter a very broad network within the music world, as the school's alumni can be found in most major professional ensembles. It is one of the few American conservatories to be completely attached to a liberal arts college. This allows students the opportunity to seriously pursue degrees in both music and a traditional liberal arts subject via the five year Double-Degree program. Oberlin College and Conservatory pride themselves on being almost exclusively undergraduate.
It premiered in the UK in an ENO production at the Young Vic in April 2008. This production was directed by Diane Paulus, with set and costume design by Riccardo Hernandez, video design by Philip Bussmann, lighting design by Mimi Jordan Sherin and sound design by Markus Noisternig. The cast included Mark Bonnar as Fred Madison, Quirijn de Lang as Pete Dayton, Valérie MacCarthy as Renne/Alice, Christopher Robson as The Mystery Man and David Moss as Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent. [5]
English National Opera (ENO) is an opera company based in London, resident at the London Coliseum in St Martin's Lane. It is one of the two principal opera companies in London, along with The Royal Opera, Covent Garden. ENO's productions are sung in English.
The Young Vic is a theatre on the Cut, located near the South Bank, in the London Borough of Lambeth. Kwame Kwei-Armah has been the theatre's artistic director since February 2018, succeeding David Lan. Its philosophy is to "produce great plays for great audiences now and in the future".
Diane Marie Paulus is the Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) at Harvard University, and was selected for the 2014 TIME 100, TIME Magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is an American director of both theater and opera Paulus was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for her revival of Hair, and won the award in 2013 for her revival of Pippin. She has received the 2009 Harvard College Women’s Leadership Award and the Columbia University IAL Diamond Award.
The German premiere was staged at the Bockenheimer Depot in Frankfurt by Yuval Sharon, with David Moss, among others. [6] [7]
The Bockenheimer Depot is a former tram depot and main workshop of the Straßenbahn Frankfurt am Main, built around 1900. It is located in the Bockenheim quarter of Frankfurt. A listed monument, it now serves as a theatre venue of the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt, mostly for Baroque and contemporary opera.
Frankfurt is a metropolis and the largest city of the German federal state of Hesse, and its 746,878 (2017) inhabitants make it the fifth-largest city of Germany after Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Cologne. On the River Main, it forms a continuous conurbation with the neighbouring city of Offenbach am Main, and its urban area has a population of 2.3 million. The city is at the centre of the larger Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region, which has a population of 5.5 million and is Germany's second-largest metropolitan region after the Rhine-Ruhr Region. Since the enlargement of the European Union in 2013, the geographic centre of the EU is about 40 km (25 mi) to the east of Frankfurt's central business district. Like France and Franconia, the city is named after the Franks. Frankfurt is the largest city in the Rhine Franconian dialect area.
Yuval Sharon is an American opera and theater director from Naperville, Illinois, based in Los Angeles. In 2017, he won the MacArthur Genius Grant.
