THE MYTH ALMA

Alma Mahler-Werfel (1879–1964): composer, praying mantis, muse, femme fatale – myth. Like no other, she is the imago of sensuality and a symbol of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Born Alma Schindler, she had a clear sense of artistic genius: she was the wife and lover of great personalities from the worlds of music, literature and the visual arts. Her first husband Gustav Mahler forbade her to pursue her own artistic endeavours to work as a composer. So, Alma sought her happiness in private: in her obsessions, her love affairs, her children.

Ella Milch-Sheriff's opera Alma focuses on an aspect that has so far received little attention in the numerous artistic adaptations of Alma Mahler-Werfel's biography: Alma, the mother. The only one of her children who survived into adulthood – her daughter Anna (1904–1988), who was a successful sculptor in the 1930s – enters into a dialogue with her mother as a stage character in order to get to the bottom of the highly complex psyche of her ‘tiger mummy’ (quote from Anna Mahler).

CONTEMPORARY PORTRAIT OPERA

Composer Ella Milch-Sheriff was born in Haifa in 1954 and studied composition at the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. Her oeuvre encompasses symphonic music as well as chamber music compositions and includes five music theatre works to date, including the chamber opera Baruch's Silence (libretto by Yael Ronen), which premiered at the Staatstheater Braunschweig in 2010, and the opera The Banality of Love, presented for the first time at the Staatstheater Regensburg in 2018 and is thematically dedicated to the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Ella Milch-Sheriff’s experience as a singer and her understanding of the human voice together with her emotional and linguistic sensitivity have made opera and vocal music a particular focus within her oeuvre. The Society of Authors/Composers and Music Publishers of Israel (ACUM) awarded Ella Milch-Sheriff the prize for her life's work in 2022.

„It was a dream of mine for years to write an opera about Alma. She is often described as a vicious woman, but if I may say so, the vast majority of biographies about Alma have been written by men. I have often wondered why she is not only fervently honoured, but also passionately hated. Who was this Alma Schindler really, who wrote ‘I want to compose a really good opera’ in her diary at the age of 19? What happened that it never materialised? I explored all these questions together with the Israeli author Ido Ricklin, who wrote a highly exciting libretto,“ says Ella Milch-Sheriff.

In the field of contemporary music, the Volksoper is currently focussing in particular on works by female composers. Following the world premiere of the successful production Lass uns die Welt vergessen – Volksoper 1938 in December 2023, which premiered newly composed music by Kapellmeister Keren Kagarlitsky, this focus is now being continued with the world premiere of the opera Alma by Israeli composer Ella Milch-Sheriff. Conductor Omer Meir Wellber, who has already premiered several of Milch-Sheriff's works, will conduct the music, while theatre artist and audience favourite Ruth Brauer-Kvam will stage the production in close collaboration with the team of authors – creating a portrait opera from the pen of one of the most exciting composers of her generation.

Soprano Annette Dasch, who most recently appeared on the Volksoper stage as Countess Dubarry in Die Dubarry, Hanna Glawari in Die lustige Witwe and Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus, takes on the role of the title character Alma. Her daughter Anna is played by mezzo-soprano Annelie Sophie Müller, who specialises in contemporary music and was last seen at the Volksoper in the Vienna State Ballet's new production of The moon wears a white shirt, based on solo works by György Ligeti, and in Moritz Eggert's world premiere of Die letzte Verschwörung.