THE OUTCAST – Homage to Herman Melville

Beschreibung
"THE OUTCAST (2008-2010)
A “Musicstallation-Theater” Piece with Video by Olga Neuwirth
Libretto by Barry Gifford and Olga Neuwirth, with monologues for Old Melville by Anna Mitgutsch

The Outcast is a work on the present worldwide crisis, a disturbing scenario of disintegration and xenophobia. It is based on Herman Melville’s richly complex and visionary book Moby Dick.
Already early on, with Baalambs Feast (1994-1998), Olga Neuwirth broke with traditional opera by mixing disciplines and media to create a number of uniquely structured works in which she intertwined the actions to dissolve the boundary between the screen and the stage. Her main topics over the last 25 years have been the fluidity of both identity and space, and their rapid changes, as well as the question of what is “real” and “fake” in sound and image which she has put in a fluid form full of ambiguities. She has also always striven to achieve a sense of “being of underway”. Nothing is stable. Everything is constantly transforming. The past and the future are considered and reconsidered using malleable heterogeneous materials, which Neuwirth lets interact and change in, as she once called it, an unpredictable web- or jungle-like sound world. Hence the use of 3D sound and video to create immersive spatial and acoustic transformations that do away with any idea of fixed identity have been an integral component of her scores since the 1990s, even though it was not yet in vogue. Through this approach she has been creating aesthetic experiences that dissolve the familiar levels of acoustic reality via a Vexierspiel (game of deception) in which singers and musicians are in dialogue with their electronic or pre-recorded alter egos. Coming together to produce a tactile immediacy and heightened emotions, Neuwirth reveals how each of us is continually creating his or her own reality, while living in a world of disorder, discontinuity, disinformation, decomposition and decay that produce entropic phenomena.
And yet—unlike in Neuwirth’s surrealistic anti-war “opera” Baalambs Feast (1994-1998), the multi-channel-surround video-opera The Long Rain (1999/2000), or the horror-like video-opera Lost Highway (2002)—there are no complex 3D loudspeaker setups in The Outcast. Nevertheless, it still plays with rapidly changing musical spaces on a traditional opera stage, while also establishing itself as a kind of installation. It is an interactive “musicstallation-theater” piece with video that presents a fragment of contemporary life by creating a resonating musical space. All these ideas merge in The Outcast. It is no wonder that for Neuwirth the sea became the metaphor of a utopian space: open, dangerous and unbound.
As has often been noted, Olga Neuwirth is well known for having uniquely expanded the musical spectrum beyond classical categories to film and video, radio plays and cartoons, and so provided the music theater world with new and original impulses since the late 1980s. Mishaps, interruptions and fissures are abundant in Neuwirth's compositions. Moreover, she is well aware that behind the false idyll of a seemingly peaceful classical music business and artistic creation, the dark violence of real life lurks and is at all times ready to break through. Neuwirth repeatedly returns to the crucial issue of the individual against the crowd or mob, and against authority. In all of her musical works since the 1980s, Olga Neuwirth has revealed with extraordinary zeal the absurdity of societal clichés and their subjugating power. And as always in Neuwirth’s oeuvre, it is also about “music with a conscience”, a mix of (emotional) storytelling, focusing on not forgetting injustices and discrimination, combined with the iconoclastic energy of music. The Outcast is an allegory and so politics are never far away. This work contextualizes her research, which she began carrying out in 2006, on the world’s oceans—those deregulated “maritime spaces”—and their fragile e"
Werkkomentar (Ricordi Berlin), abgerufen am 24.06.2021 [https://www.ricordi.com/de-DE/Catalogue.aspx/details/442226]

Uraufführung
2011 - Mannheim

Uraufführung der revidierten Fassung
14. November 2018 - Wiener Konzerthaus

Aufnahme
Titel: Trailer "The Outcast (UA)" - Olga Neuwirth
Plattform: YouTube
Herausgeber: Nationaltheater Mannheim
Datum: 11.07.2012
Mitwirkende: Nationaltheater Mannheim

Elbphilharmonie Innerview | Olga Neuwirth »The Outcast«
Plattform: YouTube
Herausgeber: Elbphilharmonie Hamburg
Datum: 28.02.2019
Mitwirkende: ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, Company of Music Münchner Knabenchor, Ilan Volkov (Dirigent)

Elbphilharmonie | Rückblick auf Olga Neuwirths »The Outcast« in der Elbphilharmonie
Plattform: YouTube
Herausgeber: Elbphilharmonie Hamburg
Datum: 26.03.2019