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Toronto - Alexander Neef, General Director of the Canadian Opera Company, announced today that the COC will be presenting the world premiere of Pyramus and Thisbe by Canadian composer Barbara Monk Feldman. Based on the story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the opera Pyramus and Thisbe was written by Monk Feldman in 2010 and will be presented as part of the COC's 2015/2016 season.
Pyramus and Thisbe fall in love but are forbidden to marry by their parents. They communicate through a crack in the wall that separates them and decide to meet secretly outside the city at night, but they miss each other in the darkness. Pyramus takes his life in the mistaken belief that Thisbe was killed by a lioness. Thisbe discovers the dying boy and also takes her own life. The families reconcile and bury the ashes of the lovers in the same urn. The tragedy of the ill-fated lovers was most famously adapted by Shakespeare for his Romeo and Juliet.
"We're very proud that the Canadian Opera Company is the first to perform Barbara's opera. The myth of Pyramus and Thisbe is the source material for all the 'forbidden love' stories, but also from an operatic viewpoint, both the mythology of forbidden love and the musical vocabulary that Barbara uses follows a very clear line from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Kaija Saariaho's more recent Love from Afar. I think people will feel the similarities," says COC General Director Alexander Neef. "Barbara's Pyramus and Thisbeis a very delicate work filled with air and space. She's taken inspiration from the painting of the same name by the great 17th century painter Nicolas Poussin as well as from the light and colour of her native Gaspé, and created a truly original piece of work."
Monk Feldman is known mostly for her chamber and piano works that have been performed in Asia, Europe and North America. Pyramus and Thisbe is her only opera.
"Although there are other aspects to consider, I am inspired by natural landscape so it makes sense that the music should be premiered in my native country. In nature the quality of the light is always subtly varying, and as a painter friend of mine said, she tries to capture the feeling that something is about to change, and this feeling is what I aim for in the music of Pyramus and Thisbe," says Barbara Monk Feldman. "I wanted the music to constantly reach out like a line and intertwine with the interior landscape of each of the characters' unconscious. The musicians in the orchestra are invited to slightly vary the attack and colour of the notes. Accompanying this subtle variation there is the intention for the chorus and soloists to sing pure, sustained tones in a quiet, even dynamic that underscores the overall non-dramatic approach."
While the opera Pyramus and Thisbe is based on Ovid's story, Monk Feldman was inspired to compose the work by the painting of the same title by Nicolas Poussin. "I first saw the painting in Frankfurt in 1983. I thought then about making this ancient love story into a modern one. It occurred to me that men and women might have had a very different perception of time in that ancient mythological age, a time before there was reason like the kind of rationality we have in the post Enlightenment sense," shares Monk Feldman. "When we look into the rolling sea waves or walk in the wilderness landscapes I think we get a sense of the earlier feeling for time that existed in the old mythological period. I decided to use very little action in the dramatic sense but to use constant motion in the way the music alternates between what I imagine as an ancient feeling for time and a modern one."
Barbara Monk Feldman was born near Montreal. After completing a master of music at McGill University in Montreal in 1983 she continued studies in Europe for a period at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiberg, Germany. Her PhD in music composition is from the State University of New York at Buffalo where she studied with Morton Feldman, to whom she was married in 1987. At S.U.N.Y. Buffalo she also completed all but the dissertation for a PhD in Music Theory. She was guest lecturer for performances of her music at the Ferienkürse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt during 1988 - 1994. She has taught at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Northwestern University in Evanston, and at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Her article "Music and the Picture Plane"has been published in res 32, The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1997 and in Contemporary Music Review, 1998. Her music has been performed in Europe, Japan and North America, including the ICA in London, New Music Concerts in Toronto, the Festival Nieuwe Muziek in Middelburg, The Netherlands, the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, MaerzMusik in Berlin, and has been recorded for radio by BBC London, BRT Brussels, CBC Montreal and Toronto, HR Frankfurt and WDR Cologne.
Pyramus and Thisbe will be presented alongside the COC premieres of Claudio Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna (1608) and Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624). The operas will be sung in English and Italian with English SURTITLESTM, and will run for seven performances on October 20, 23, 25, 28, November 5, 7 (two performances), 2015 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
For more information on the inspiration behind Pyramus and Thisbe, read Barbara Monk Feldman's Composer's Note.
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