Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Andrée Greenwell  
© Katerina Stratos

AMC Represented Artist Andrée Greenwell has been working on a new chamber opera since 2019. Developed through the pandemic with international collaborators, Three Marys is finally about to make its premiere at the Sydney Opera House.

Ahead of its first performance season, we caught up with the composer to find out how this powerful new chamber opera came together.

Congratulations on the staging of Three Marys at the Sydney Opera House! We hear you started this work in 2019. Can you tell us more about how this work and production developed?

It has been a long and very complex road to develop this work and its premier production.

I commenced Three Marys in the later part of an Australia Council for the Arts Fellowship when I had the opportunity for a chamber opera workshop, supported by Opera Queensland (OQ) and Queensland Performing Arts Centre. I had pursued one idea for some months but the scope became impractical, and I had to start again, to find a suitable new idea. This took some time, but somehow it seemed the story of the Three Marys found me. The potential for a richly layered work seemed idea for the form.

Writing many grant applications for developments, managing the developments, securing funds for realisation and conducting music for the workshops, are additional roles to composing that have taken an enormous amount of time and energy. The artistic part - finding the appropriate writer - the dramatist and novelist Christine Evans as librettist, and then working together with Angela Chaplin as dramaturg has been an absolute joy.

There were showings of early scenes at Balmain Town Hall [in Sydney] for an Inner West Council arts activation, then at OQ in Brisbane. The responses were fantastic and we were so excited about the potential for a production.

Then the pandemic happened. Companies and presenters around the country lost enormous amounts of money and no one was planning ahead. Suddenly, this timely new chamber opera about women, led by women, that included a teen choir was not a realistic proposition. There were some dark days, when I wondered if this beautiful and courageous work would see the light of day.

After a couple of years, it seemed the best way forward was to pursue an independent production. The trajectory of the work was buoyed by RISE (Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand), and further support for from local, state and national funding agencies, then the key link - support and commitment for presentation by Sydney Opera House. No independent chamber opera of this kind has been presented there. It's very exciting for all involved.

A fabulous production team is making this independent production possible. Robert Love and Sean Moloney have joined the project as Producers which is fantastic. Neil Simpson, who has worked on many of my works is Production Manager, Peggy Polias is our superb Music Assistant and Elizabeth Jigalin will prepare the surtitles.

We have a brilliant team of creative artists involved: director Angela Chaplin, set and costume designer Anna Tregloan, choral director Elizabeth Scott, lighting designer Damien Cooper and conductor Simon Kenway.

What drew you to the legend of the Three Marys?

There are different versions of the medieval myth about the exiled biblical women who sailed in an oarless boat from the Middle East to the South of France (the village Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is named after the women) as to who was on that boat. One version suggests that in addition to the iconic characters Mary and Mary Magdalene, that the third woman might have been the daughter of Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Growing up surrounded by many silent representations of women in a Catholic upbringing, this story resonated with me. The moment of ignition for me was the idea of three generations of women in that boat. I could see the potential to "give voice" to women in literal and metaphoric ways through the artistic medium of opera, that would resonate contemporarily.

How did you approach the composition of the music and the collaboration with Christine Evans for this opera?

I have worked with the words of contemporary and historic writers throughout my career, and from many forms: poetry, drama, verbatim, found texts; and in non-linear and linear narrative forms. Yet, every collaboration with a writer is utterly unique - I find it a privilege to experience the creative mind of a writer in a collaboration.

Christine developed a fully original and compelling scenario (many new operas are adaptations) and she has interwoven characters that speak from ancient to contemporary times. It's also a secular telling - our own version of the myth. Our starting point was to ask "What might have happened to the women on such a journey? What might they say to each other outside of the religious representations?" for example… grief, desire, anger, terror, the forces of nature and then the daily domestic challenges.

Once the basic dramatic arc of the work was established, we discussed key arias/vocal combinations at certain dramatic points. This was reviewed as we went, with new scenes/sections revised for structural balance and kinetic impulse. While I am very respectful to the meanings of the text in the ways that I craft the music, I am assertive in making requests so that the libretto responds to the score's evolving shape, so there was a lot of back and forth. Christine has written a beautiful and incisive libretto.

Key to the advancement of the libretto was the input of dramaturg Angela Chaplin, who is also the director of the production. She is highly experienced in commissioning new plays, has worked a lot with young people, and people of minority cultures. During the pandemic we had many three-way Zoom meetings and read drafts of the libretto together.

Our international collaboration during with pandemic was not without challenge. Given Christine lives in the US, there were very many Zoom meetings and electronic file exchanges. If she had been based locally, I would have been playing scenes to her in my studio as we went. That Christine was able to attend the early workshops was fantastic. It's difficult for writers to imagine the complex layering of musical lines and voicing until you are in the rehearsal room and together assess the success of those interactions.

For my composition approach, I needed to first work out the appropriate instrumentation and vocal resources - this impacts the production scale. In addition to the four cast, I opted for a young mixed gender choir for narrative reasons as much as for timbral contrast. The geography of the narrative and its reach from ancient to contemporary times is reflected in the instrumentation: traditional Western classical instruments, oud, electronic keyboards and some sound design.

I read the text a lot before I begin composing, so that I am very familiar with the qualities of sonance, rhythm and phrasing. There is a lot of discipline in handling the form - I worked a scene at a time and scheduled how many weeks to work on each, for the first draft.

I am very aware of the responsibility of transforming the libretto to score - that the shaping of music events horizontally and vertically is a pre-performative act, which determines the temporal unfolding of narrative and drama. In the case of this chamber opera (and any music drama of scale) the challenge was to find and establish an appropriate tone within the parameters of the music language, for every moment. At the commencement of each scene, I wondered if I could suitably match the intensity of key dramatic events. While I use various software programs to compose, in this case I used a pencil and manuscript, singing at the piano to write draft vocal lines first, wanting the work to evolve organically from the text.

What is the symbolism behind the use of the voices?

I considered that opera would be a potent form to give agency to both the iconic and imagined women of this story - through sung voice.

From very early on I imagined a teenage choir. We are thrilled 16 singers from The Arts Unit Public Schools will perform the role of the Teen Chorus, under the direction of Elizabeth Scott. Thinking about a way to resonate the arc of the journey that inspired this work, they sing mostly in English, with French and Arabic at times.

Christine had a wonderful idea to include a fisherman, Marzoug. This character is inspired by the contemporary Tunisian fisherman Chamseddine Marzoug who cares for the bodies of refugees that washed up on his shores. In our opera, Marzoug makes a vow to the Chorus that he will watch the women and see them return, while saving the names and stories of the children from disappearing into the ocean.

The vocal tessitura has been considered to differentiate between the generational differences of grandmother, daughter-law/mother and granddaughter/daughter. We have a fantastic cast - Heru Pinkasova as Maria, Jessica O'Donoghue as Magdalena and Samantha Hargreaves as Sarah Marie. Eddie Muliaumaseali'i will perform the role of Marzoug.

You've created a number of chamber opera and theatrical works to date. How has your writing style evolved over time?

I don't describe my works as 'theatrical' - to me that's a decorative descriptor. I am interested in the potential of original score to contribute to an artistic debate; how various music and sonic media can engage a theatrical or conceptual argument. Here, I think about much of my artistic practice as 'music theatre', and I mean in continuation of the exploratory twentieth century post-war traditions, often confused with the commercial 'musical' (I also consider the 'musical' or 'musical theatre' and 'opera' to be part of a broad music theatre culture).

As artistic director and composer of Green Room Music, I have created seven long form works now - set to the writing of (mostly) contemporary women writers. One gets better with practice and opportunity, that's pretty straightforward. But I want to work with challenging concepts and at scale - this takes resources, time, and requires support from others.

Many people comment on the diversity of music genres, instrumentations and artistic forms that I use in my music making. That is all part of being forward moving - developing technique alongside considered artistic expression. I think that's why I did not establish, for example, a band or ensemble, which confines music expression to a particular instrumentation. I want to be able to work with different music expressions in each project, which is so stimulating.

I initiated the chamber opera Sweet Death, commissioned by Chamber Made Opera for the Melbourne International Festival, 1991, based upon Claude Tardat's novel about a young woman who wilfully gorges herself on gourmet pastries and sweets - to death. That work utilised the operatic model as metaphor for restrictions placed upon women and their bodies. There are other elements Three Marys that both celebrate and extend the form. I suggest that people come along and discover what that is in performance.

There are strong parallels with current global events and movements through exile and refuge-seeking. At the same time, Three Marys is very much a resounding story about women. What would you like listeners and audiences to take away from this chamber opera?

Well, I think you have well-described the layered themes that I hope people will be prompted to reflect upon by experiencing this chamber opera. It will be an emotionally charged experience. These are big themes - survival and its costs. I think that the sung voice in this form provides us with a special point of visceral connection to focus these human experiences and hopefully, elicit a response. It is also a work filled with love - the compassion Marzoug feels for those lost at sea, and the love between three generations of women.

Image: Three Marys. Photographer: Katerina Stratos

Three Marys will be performing at the Sydney Opera House from Thursday 11 May to Saturday 13 May 2023.