Iain Grandage & Alison Croggon, based on the novel by Tim Winton THE RIDERS Merlyn Theatre, The Coopers Malthouse 23 September – 4 October 2014 Image: Charlie Kinross Artistic Director & Conductor’s Message ranging from celtic folksong, bazouki musica, jazz referentialities and dodecaphonic processes woven into a logically-structured and effective work for the theatre. Our cast of fine actor/singers have embraced the piece and made it their own – a sure sign of its strength: a strength established by its sure-footed language, innate theatricality and consequent communicative power. Its creators are sensitive, able and generous collaborators, flexible and concerned only with the pursuit of creative artistic truth. Our co-production with Malthouse Bringing this work to life has really been a great Theatre is a good example of what can be achieved adventure and at once engaging and enticing by two institutions with a core commitment to for all of us at Victorian Opera. New work is at the Australian story working in harmony. I thank the centre of the artistic practice of the company. Malthouse Theatre Artistic Director Marion Potts We place a special emphasis on the creation of and her team for their dedication and willingness new Australian work and giving it the best context, to embrace the conventions of our artform and support and opportunity to succeed. Stravinsky once I thank Neil Armfield who made important early famously remarked that “nothing is likely about contributions to the formulation of the libretto. masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any” For their continued support of Victorian Opera’s – while this is true, artistic direction involves creation new work commissions, I also extend sincere thanks of a team whose elements at least indicate the to The Robert Salzer Foundation and the Victorian possibility of the emergence of something of lasting Opera New Work Syndicate. value capable of speaking to an audience. The Riders is a subject from modern Australia, rich We have been fortunate to have promising in its juxtaposition of the old and new worlds – yet ingredients; a great Australian novel by Tim Winton, with a story that is a deeply personal and spiritual one of our most loved and read storytellers; librettist journey by a man, led by his daughter, whose Alison Croggon, who is a dramaturge and poet of intuitive and innocent comprehension of a father’s real stature; and composer Iain Grandage, whose need for love, enables him to begin anew. structured and theatrical sense is as masterly as his technical equipment. Writing a major work Welcome and enjoy. for the lyric stage involves many levels of musical, textual and dramatic discourse. The music of The Richard Mills Riders is a complex synthesis of different elements, Victorian Opera Artistic Director & Conductor Richard Mills / ARTISTIC dirECTOR & condUCTOR'S MESSAGE Artistic Director & Director’s Message story that doesn't take place in Australia – that is in a constant search, elsewhere. The creative team broached the design with a number of key ideas drawn from the text. It felt important to anchor the world in Scully's own experience of it. Building is a central activity, a vehicle for his devotion and his tenacious pursuit of an ideal – the small house in Ireland like a humble cathedral for the deification of Jennifer. It is dwarfed by Notre Dame, but is every bit as towering. Scully in it, is an ineffectual, galumphing Quasimodo. Creating an opera of The Riders carries in itself an interesting tension. Scully, the down-to-earth Many of our conversations turned back to The Riders Australian male – a meat-and-potatoes kind of themselves, these strange preternatural creatures that guy – is brought to life through this heightened seem to exist both inside and outside of Scully, but and deeply enculturated operatic form, a form somehow channel his terror. Are they an extension of that would not routinely be part of his own Scully himself, intruders into his nightmares, or real lived experience. But the lens through which creatures of the night? we encounter this story very much supports it: it provides for something both intimate and epic, Finally, the globe no less, is the setting for this story. physical and metaphysical, for something that We wanted to conjure its shape, its enormity, its liminality – as if we were almost trapped inside it as conjures the mysterious ‘otherness’ of The Riders, well as traversing its surface and always in danger of and represents Scully's traumatised, pixelating falling off it. It's an elusive world that like Jennifer is brain – at the very same moment as it allows for the always just beyond our grasp, and that keeps outpouring of high-stake human emotion. re-setting its own horizon line. Journey, motion, Alongside librettist Alison Croggon, Iain Grandage became important things to address within is the Australian composer who synthesises these the design. contradictions and gives their internal tension a final All of these discoveries were borne of a proper cohesive expression. His own personal connection collaborative environment. Malthouse Theatre is to the story and his prodigious talent bring into thrilled to join Victorian Opera in a project that focus aspects of our cultural consciousness: the expands the Australian repertoire in such Winton phenomenon and his representation of exciting ways. Australia via our experience of other countries, languages, and forms. At some level it's a nod to Marion Potts the hybridity of our European culture – an Australian Malthouse Theatre Artistic Director & Director ARTISTIC DIRECTOR & DIRECTOR'S MESSAGE / Marion Potts Composer's Message Accordion, Bouzouki and Recorders and the music not only intimates various vernacular musics – folk, cabaret, music hall – but also directly quotes folk songs, including the novel’s own linking refrain On Raglan Road. The interlocking harmonic languages of the characters utilize elements of Serialism, hexachordal tropes, Minimalism and fin-de-siècle Romanticism. Scully’s melodic motifs center on the interval of the Perfect 4th, which when cycled, generates the key structure for the work. Jennifer’s I grew up in Western Australia, a first generation music is dominated by harmonies created from Australian of English parentage. The world of my youth was filled with dunes and beaches, boulder- expanding and contracting 10ths, stacked clambering and desert trips, and whilst these places and striving upwards, given their most direct were mine to experience, the stories contained utterance in Act 3 Scene 1. Billie’s music takes within them weren’t. Having since had the privilege on versions of both her parents’ musical worlds, of working extensively with Indigenous Australians but is invariably closer to Scully’s than Jennifer’s. and seeing this inescapable connection between The Riders themselves owe their rhythmic life to country and culture first hand, I found myself 12/8 galloping figurations (think Schubert’s Der seeking my own family’s ancient stories from within Erlkönig) while their harmonic language is derived my Anglo – Celtic heritage. from a tone row that turns ever inwards. So it is that I was drawn to Tim Winton’s The Riders I’ve been blessed by the quality of my collaborators – a novel that draws on aspects of ancient European on this project, and would like to thank: Neil mythology as seen through the eyes of an Australian Armfield, Alison Croggon, Richard Mills, Marion – Scully – a ‘desert Irishman’ as Winton puts it. Potts and the amazing cast. Given my long relationship with Tim (starting with the stage adaptation of Cloudstreet and moving through At its heart, The Riders is about the nature of love. his first play Rising Water and film of The Turning) It deals with questions of how well we can truly this felt like it could be my story to tell. know someone; how well we can truly know ourselves. Writing The Riders has been just such a When conceiving The Riders, I wanted a musical process of self-examination for me. There’s a lot of palette that could speak as much to other musical me in it. My hope is that it feels like your story too. traditions as to a conventional operatic language. To this end, the orchestration includes Piano Iain Grandage Composer Iain Grandage / COMPOSER'S MESSAGE Librettist’s Message The Riders is about a man whose wife inexplicably abandons him and his daughter. Scully, one of Winton’s bluff, emotionally inarticulate men, is renovating a house in Ireland, waiting for his wife Jennifer and his daughter Billie to arrive from Perth and complete the home he is making for them. But when he goes to the airport, only Billie, traumatised and silent, is waiting for him. The novel consists of what unravels after this event, as Scully hunts frantically through Europe for his wife. Perhaps the most obvious change we’ve made is Although I’ve written a number of libretti, I’ve the presence of Jennifer. In the book she is simply never adapted a novel before. They’re not the an absence; in the opera, mindful that it’s hard to most obvious form for opera. Tim Winton’s The stage an absence, we’ve given her a voice. Riders is more than a hundred thousand words The Riders are Scully’s hauntings, a band of long; in order to turn it into a work of music horsemen who first turn up at the castle near his theatre, I’ve had to boil that down into something bothy. They are both real and phantasmagoric. For less than five thousand. us, they are our chorus: both witnesses to and symptoms of Scully’s panic and paralysis. In effect, I’ve attempted to translate The Riders into another form.