Daphnes Garten and Rattensturm - out now

The recording of Daphnes Garten has just been released on Spooky Pooch, available in a variety of digital formats on bandcamp, packaged along with the libretto in German and English, telling the story of the murder of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. 

On the 16th October 2017, the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered with a car bomb. DCG, as she was in Maltese media, published her own research on the Panama Papers, the massive leak that revealed a worldwide network of offshore companies in 2016. Using the story of a courageous journalist who paid for her commitment to the truth with her life, Daphnes Garten tells a story of international corruption, greed and murder, as well as her love for her garden, her refuge.

This is the third opera of mine that has premiered in its German version, after two that have been performed in German translation.  The recording of the previous - Rattensturm - came out a few years ago, not mentioned here before, so maybe it's time for that as well.

World War I began with the poets, inviting young men in the name of duty and country to feed themselves into the insatiable maw of Verdun, Isonzo, and Ypres. Rattensturm (a storm of rats) is a film of an opera as beautiful history lesson, telling the story of the sinking of the battleship Szent István, while the rats sing of the glories of death and destruction. Be careful who you listen to.

Daphne recording

Almost all

My good friend Jay Cloidt has been mixing the Daphne recording.  He's mixed everything of mine since I think the Missa Notkeri Bulbuli.  It's sounding lovely.  I'm not sure what to do with these German-language opera recordings.  I feel a need to have them as beautiful documents of the music and the way I imagine the music, but I doubt my typical English-speaking fans will enjoy them as much as they could, and I don't have that many contacts in German lands outside of those that commissioned the operas. It's too bad one can't have subtitles floating in space while listening to an audio recording. 

Daphnes Garten performances coming up

 

Premiere is at the OHO in Oberwart, link for tickets etc here: https://www.oho.at/programm/daphnes-garten

Travels next to Klagenfurt: http://klagenfurterensemble.at/produktion/daphnes-garten/

And some others early in 2024. 

Daphnes Garten

I agreed to a request from Austria for another opera: Daphnes Garten, a co-commission from Gerhard Lehner of the Klagenfurter Ensemble and Peter Wagner of the Offenes Haus Oberwart, which will tour in November through December. While it is now almost done, and it is beautiful, the composition of it has been a stress-inducing sleep-depriving nightmare, as it was intermingled with my ongoing day job as an Executive Scientist® and the continuing filming of She Who Is Alive.

This opera, by my count my sixth in German, is a dreamy telling of the story of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese journalist who brought to light corruption throughout Europe. Receiving hundreds of thousands of emails, she was the nexus, the go-to contact for all things corrupt, and what she found was later all supported - and more - by the Panama Papers leak, until one morning when she was shredded in a car bomb explosion. The two assassins - two brothers - one who watched and one who sat on his boat texting the bomb's code sequence REL1=on., have been imprisoned, and some up the chain have faced some consequences, but at the top, not so much. 

After her death, her husband said "The more frustrated Daphne grew at the state of our country, the more beautiful our garden became," and the garden throughout is a touchstone of the beauty that still is to be found even when the honorable men do their best to destroy everything.

The libretto, by the Austrian playwright Katharina Tiwald, is by turns high-comedy and heart-wrenching.  I can't read the end of it, where we hear a roll call of the dead, without crying, and especially the line "The good that women do lives after them. I have done my best to write music that is manipulative and shredding in its own way.  

I'm polishing it up now, sending it off to the Austrians along with the usual Erling-as-German-Bing-Crosby singing all the parts so the director can plan it out before the instruments and singers arrive in a few weeks.  To my fans it may be of interest that one of these recordings exists for every one of my operas - all quite horrifying, but charming.