The world premiere of this new Australian opera – a work that prompts dread as well as wonder about humanity's relationship with the natural world – was an enormous triumph, artistically and logistically.

The new Australian opera Antarctica, which premiered at this week’s Holland Festival to standing ovations, is as ambitious as a flying cellist, vast as Berlioz’s account of the Trojan wars, and cruel as Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods: it portrays the crash of the Enlightenment mindset against that vast and unforgiving plane of ice. The task of preparing it in Sydney during the pandemic, then staging it in the 17th century Dutch capital of global trade is a feat to compare with premiering Aida in Cairo. (Ed: read more about the background of the work in this feature article from our June 2022 issue.)

Antarctica, which premiered at the 2022 Holland Festival. Photo © Ada Nieuwendijk.

The plot is unlike anything in the tradition of grand opera: no tenor is in love, and there is no prima donna. It is not ‘about’ any personal conflict among characters. Structured as a collection of tableaux, it presents even less development and causality than Schönberg’s convention-breaking masterpieces of a century ago. Tom Wright’s libretto includes much trenchant poetry deploring the sinister deep south, but the work is best enjoyed by focusing on Mary Finsterer’s magnificent music rather than watching out for any revelatory dramatic action.

Perhaps the most familiar precedent is Peter Grimes, where Britten gives many of the best numbers to the orchestra alone, making the sea a character drawn in its various moods, an antagonist to the inadequate fisherman Peter. Here a relatively small instrumental ensemble plus electronic samples speak as the ice-covered continent, compared to which the European explorers and all humans are ill-equipped for their aspirations and consequent ordeals.

Finsterer’s complex yet easily apprehended orchestration swells from the intimate delicacy of a child’s music box to a vast enveloping panorama that makes most Hollywood science fiction soundtracks sound less than epic by comparison. The Dutch ensemble Asko|Schönberg, who commissioned the score, are one of the finest contemporary music groups in the world; they were here conducted with precision by Jack Symonds, whose Sydney Chamber Opera also premiered Finsterer’s previous opera Biographica in 2017.

Asko|Schönberg Ensemble. Photo © Tom ten Seldam.

The impressive, almost overwhelming set by Elizabeth Gadsby is framed as a 9 metre square of video panels; it has similarities to the East Antarctic ice shelf: unusual, very large, mostly very white and sometimes extremely bright. Additional lighting by Alexander Berlage also covered a strip between the small orchestra pit and the giant screen, along which a child walks very slowly. Even music diehards who routinely close their eyes during operas will notice white light penetrating their eyelids at times.

Perhaps the intention of director Imara Savage was to cast a gigantic spotlight on the audience as they contemplate their relationship to a continent where they have never set foot. Ever since Monteverdi’s pioneering 1607 fable of Opheus’s journey into the infernal regions, opera has served as armchair travel to inaccessible destinations. Here a kind of catharsis is achieved by sharing the Enlightenment goals, and by feeling the failures and disappointments of the characters, with glaring light all round.

Savage eschews the obvious opportunity to insert breathtaking landscape drone video such as could be found in an IMAX cinema: that would distract from the music and turn it into a mere accompaniment. Instead video designer Mike Daly uses this gigantic canvas of full colour pixels to suggest, with clunky black and white low-res lettering of latitude and longitude, how very little of this vast inhospitable region humans can ever appreciate.

Two spaces are cut out of the screen: one for the child who gazes out mute; the other a mist-filled perspex aquarium positioned like a royal box. It’s hard to imagine a more inhospitable platform for the singers, who after their long flights from Australia must have felt some kinship with the intrepid 19th century travellers they were portraying. Wright names his characters as archetypes such as The Theologian (Jessica O’Donoghue), The Cartographer (Michael Petruccelli), and The Natural Philosopher (Anna Fraser); this trio in Victorian costume delivers one of the most arresting numbers from behind the three panels of perspex. This could only succeed with excellent sound engineering and design, a credit to Arne Bock and the outstanding acoustic of the auditorium at the Muziekgebouw, one of the most prestigious spaces for contemporary music in Europe.

Mary Finsterer and Tom Wright at the Antarctica Symposium at the University of Tasmania. Photo © Dean Golja.

A few questions spoken in English by a disembodied booming voice feel heavy-handed compared to the many expansive and lovely passages sung in Latin; these animate the conflict between religious dogma and science: Mappa mundi (chart of the world), Prima creatura (the first creature), and long lists of taxonomic names of species, which also fill the screen in a graceful typographic ballet.

Out of many striking numbers, perhaps the most confronting aria was the curse of The Captain (Simon Lobelson), apprehensive about his mission, frustrated by speculative or even fictional navigation information, freezing and dying at the bleeding edge of colonial exploration. Clearly we are not just being entertained: this is a warning, prompting dread as well as wonder. But no specifics are given on whether this is about the ozone layer, or sea levels rising, or billionaire joy flights to Mars, or nuclear proliferation, or any other step on the road to the collapse of civilization.

Even six decades after the Cold War-era Treaty of 1961 established international agreement on the ownership of Antarctica, the southernmost continent remains undefeated by human intruders. This magnificent musical portrait of mankind’s slowly-shattered geopolitical dreams gives us an important opportunity to meditate on the relationship of our belligerent and expansionist civilisation to the only continent we have left uninhabited. Those vast melting sheets hold tough lessons for us, and this opera shines a dazzlingly bright light on many of them. The premiere in Amsterdam was without doubt a milestone for Australian opera, and may also prove a landmark for the genre of chamber opera, because it clearly surpassed in impact a typical production of super-sized 19th century classics such as the Flying Dutchman, in just 90 minutes. Anyone who can get to the next production of Antarctica should certainly try hard.

Antarctica premiered at the 2022 Holland Festival on 5 & 6 June. Full credits, the program and the libretto are available on the festival’s website.

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