Olga Neuwirth

Olga Neuwirth (born 4 August 1968 in Graz) is an Austrian contemporary classical composer, visual artist and author.

She gained fame mainly through her operas and music theater works, which often deal with topical and decidedly political themes of identity, violence and intolerance.

Neuwirth was born in Graz, the daughter of Griseldis Neuwirth and pianist Harald Neuwirth.

She is the niece of Gösta Neuwirth and the sister of sculptor Flora Neuwirth.

As a child at the age of seven, Neuwirth began lessons on the trumpet but was forced to abandon her original plans to study trumpet after an accident that left her with a jaw injury.

As a high school student, Neuwirth took part in composition workshops with Hans Werner Henze and Gerd Kühr.

At the age of 16, she met writer Elfriede Jelinek, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the two artists have since enjoyed an artistically "fruitful collaboration".

The then-17-year-old composer named her first commissioned composition Die gelbe Kuh tanzt Ragtime.

She refers to an “art in-between.” Stefan Drees remarks: “The catastrophic, the plunge into unfamiliar regions with all the attendant consequences, is therefore a fundamental mood of her compositions, winding like a red thread through her works.” Usually assigned to the category of so-called contemporary classical music, her works since the late 1980s have sought to transcend the genre restrictions imposed by the music business.

The work was composed for the opening of the steirischer herbst festival in 1985.

In 1985/86, she studied music and art at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with Elinor Armer.

She studied painting and film at the San Francisco Art College.

Neuwirth first studied composition with Elinor Armer at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, beginning in 1986.

She also studied painting and film at San Francisco’s Art College.

She continued her studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna under Erich Urbanner, while studying at the Institute for Composition and Electroacoustics.

Her master's thesis was written on the music in Alain Resnais's film L'Amour à mort, entitled "On the use of film music in L'amour à mort by Alain Resnais."

Interested in a broad spectrum of stimuli and possibilities of expression, Neuwirth was already crossing genre boundaries between theatrical drama, opera, radio drama, performance art and video in the 1990s.

This was reflected in the titles of her works, for example in The Outcast – a musicstallation-theater.

Neuwirth often set herself the goal of breaking up established forms of concert presentation in order to arrive at a “fluid form”.

In 1993/94 she studied with Tristan Murail and worked at IRCAM, producing such works as "...?risonanze!..." for viola d'amore.

She received significant inspiration in this period from her encounters with Adriana Hölszky (Nicht beirren lassen! Weitermachen!) and the Italian composer Luigi Nono.

Neuwirth had the chance to meet with Luigi Nono, who had similarly radical politics, and has claimed this had a strong influence on her life.

She has numerous chamber music works released on the Kairos label, and has collaborated with Elfriede Jelinek on the opera "Bählamms Fest."

Neuwirth's opera of David Lynch's film Lost Highway incorporates both live and pre-recorded audio and visual feeds, alongside other electronics.

Neuwirth’s works contain an explicit expansion of the artistic effect from the concert hall into public spaces, for example in Talking Houses (1996), a sound installation for shops along the main square of Deutschlandsberg, Austria (created jointly with Hans Hoffer), and in the sound installation ...le temps désechanté ... ou dialogue aux enfers (2005) at the Place Igor Stravinsky in Paris.

For example, during the breaks in her two “portrait concerts” at the 1998 Salzburg Festival, the sound of wind-up toy instruments on a reinforced metal plate was transmitted into the concert hall’s auditorium by means of several loudspeakers, with visuals projected live onto a screen, creating an immersive listening experience.

In addition, “prompt texts” for the audience’s behavior, written by Jelinek, were inserted into the work.

The world premiere took place in Graz in 2003, performed by the Klangforum Wien with the electronics realized at the Institut für Elektronische Musik (IEM).

The American premiere of the opera took place at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and featured further performances at Columbia University's Miller Theatre in New York City, produced by Oberlin Conservatory and the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble.

The surround-sound recording released by Kairos was awarded the Diapason d'Or.

Neuwirth has created several full-length music theatre works, including the video opera Lost Highway (2003), based on David Lynch’s film; Bählamms Fest (1993/1997), drawing on the work of Leonora Carrington; The Outcast, referencing Herman Melville; and American Lulu, inspired by Alban Berg.

Neuwirth's opera Orlando, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, is the first full-length opera composed by a woman and commissioned by the Vienna State Opera to be performed in Vienna.

For this latter work, commissioned in 2005 by IRCAM Paris, a motion-capture camera was used to allow electroacoustic sounds to interact with the streams of people moving through the square.

As the number of passers-by rose, a musical transformation was set in motion.

However, the Paris police ultimately ordered the sound installation to be shut down.

The UK premiere took place at the Young Vic in London in April 2008, in a co-production with the English National Opera, directed by Diane Paulus and conducted by Baldur Brönnimann.

Neuwirth’s original compositional style is characterized by the use of diverse compositional techniques and hybrid sound materials, with a constant questioning of artistic and socio-political norms.

From a multitude of “sources of inspiration...from art, architecture, literature and music, intellectual history, psychology, natural science, and everyday reality [...]." Neuwirth creates an art from that is as multidimensional as it is distinct. For example, in Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie (2014), Neuwirth's preoccupation with Herman Melville's novella The Encantadas (1894), as well as inspirations from the sound world of Luigi Nono – here especially from his influential work Prometeo (1984) – coalesce into a “fictional adventure novel through multiple spatial sound effects.” The starting point of this composition is an acoustical survey (Neuwirth: “preservation of acoustic heritage” ) of the Chiesa San Lorenzo in Venice.

The world premiere took place on 8 December 2019.

It was later selected as the world premiere of the year in an international critics' poll conducted by the trade journal Opernwelt.