Olga Neuwirth is to receive next year’s Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for her opera Orlando.

The Austrian composer’s work is based on Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography, which tells of a young male poet in 16th century England who becomes female at age 30 and lives until the early 20th century, and which has become a classic work of feminist literature. Neuwirth’s opera likewise embraces several centuries in its music, drawing on styles from Tudor-era ballads to modern electronic sound layering.

'I wanted to reflect the wonderful diversity of life and evoke a subtle form of sexual attraction that cannot be pigeonholed into a single gender,' Neuwirth said. 'What’s more, the main character refuses to be patronized and treated in a condescending manner, something that continually happens to women with no end in sight.' Orlando was commissioned by Vienna State Opera and premiered in 2019. You can watch a selection of excerpts below. 

The Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition is given by the University of Louisville. Marc Satterwhite, who directs the Grawemeyer music award, described Orlando as ‘an enormous, supremely ambitious work. The libretto and multifaceted score challenge our preconceptions of gender and sexual roles and test our ideas of what opera is and is not. It also seems appropriate that the first female-composed opera to be performed at the Vienna State Opera, a venue long regarded as a bastion of tradition, should take aim at these issues.’

Previous recipients of the prestigious prize, worth $100,000, have included Hans Abrahamsen, Louis Andriessen, Esa-Pekka Salonen, György Kurtág, Kaija Saariaho and Unsuk Chin.

Gramophone recently profiled Olga Neuwirth in our Contemporary Composer feature, which you can read here: Olga Neuwirth