Or­lan­do

Virginia Woolf dedicated her visionary novel Orlando to her lover Vita Sackville-West in 1928. In the opera Orlando, which premiered in 2019, the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth continues the fictional biography into the present day and embarks on her own musical journey through time, from madrigals to electronic music. Director Ewelina Marciniak brings this kaleidoscopic work on the fluidity of time, style and gender roles to a German stage for the first time in this new production by the Komische Oper Berlin.

IV

Retired to his estate, Orlando falls into a death-like sleep. Doctors try in vain to cure him with dubious methods. On the seventh day, Orlando awakens determined to be nothing but a poet from now on: his work is to be titled The Oak Tree. He invites the writer Nicholas Greene to discuss poetry with him. Greene, narrow-minded and smug, takes Orlando’s money but publicly tears his poetry to shreds.


V

Disappointed once again, Orlando turns his back on England and asks to be sent as an ambassador to a country as far away as possible. Amid the turmoil of war, Orlando once again falls into a week-long slumber.


VI

The three sisters – Chastity, Purity and Modesty – try to hide, conceal and cover up the truth, but it breaks through:


VII

Orlando awakens as a woman. Without a doubt. Orlando has changed sex but otherwise remains exactly the same person.


VII

Orlando boards a ship back to England, returns to her homeland as a woman and notices the men’s gazes on her body.


IX

England, 1719. Orlando aspires to a career as a poet. She invites the prominent writers Pope, Dryden and Addison for tea, but as a woman, she remains excluded from their conversations. An intrusive duke proposes marriage to her – No, thank you.


X

19th century. Orlando observes how the Victorian ideal of the family leads to the oppression of women and to sexualized violence against women and children. She decides to write against it so as not to leave the telling of the story to men.


XI

1917. Orlando cannot imagine ever getting married, until she meets the war correspondent Shelmerdine. She will have a child with him.


XII

Orlando and Shelmerdine get married, but the wars and atrocities show no sign of ending.


XIII

The 1968 movement rebels and fi ghts for peace, civil rights and women’s rights.


XIV

1989. The digital age has begun. Orlando writes, even though critics deny her talent. By chance, she runs into Greene again, who has since become a powerful publisher.


XV

Greene rejects The Oak Tree. He claims the work is too complicated and needs to be simplifi ed, but that is out of the question for Orlando.


XVI

Capitalism and consumerism: supermarket cashiers work at breakneck speed. Orlando’s child is now an adult and, as a non-binary artist, advocates for sexual freedom and bodily autonomy.


XVII

The opposing forces are also growing stronger: A mob of mutants chants slogans that deeply disturb Orlando. She believes she recognizes people from her past in the angry crowd, though they are disfi gured by hatred and disinformation.


XVIII

The present has dawned. Orlando looks into an uncertain future.


XIX

Past, present and future dissolve. Orlando writes and will continue to write to share her story, to resist prejudice and to stand up for freedom and humanity.