Alan John

Both Dennis Watkins and I “took shape” in parallel with the edifice on Bennelong Point. Dennis can trace his origins back a further few years but I was conceived a few months after the designs were unveiled in 1957. Discussions about “eyesores” and “white elephants” and Opera House lottery tickets inhabit the periphery of my childhood memories. One Saturday afternoon around 1965 our family, like most others in Sydney, did “the tour” of the construction site. I remember a lot of scaffolding and the sherbety explosion of my first ever gelato from a gaudily hand-painted van. (It took a while for exotic Italian notions to filter out to the suburbs though, and by the time the building opened my mother was still using a pressure cooker to turn spaghetti into soft white worms.) I remember the thrill of disbelief when my high school music teacher gave out the brochures for the 1973 Sydney Symphony Orchestra Youth Series: the final concert would take place in the new Opera House Concert Hall. An all-Bartok program! Roger Woodward ultimately opted for Brahms’s first over Bela’s second concerto but still, it seemed like Australia had belatedly embraced the 20th century.

In the absence of a stereo at home, my musical general knowledge had steadily progressed via reel to reel bootlegs of ABC radio 2FC broadcasts, achieved by placing a toy microphone in front of my parents’ old valve radio. The opening of the Opera House accelerated the expansion to Big-Bang levels. Over the next few years, visiting any of its halls and theatres was intoxicating. There was no squeamishness about the compromised interiors; in fact the botched sightlines from several balconies in the Opera Hall provided the cheap seats of my University years to hear (if never fully see) the likes of Don Shanks, John Pringle, Heather Begg and Robert Gard. To say the idea they would one day be singing an opera of my own didn’t enter my head, is a ridiculous understatement. Despite the benign academic influence of Prof. Peter Platt, Peter Sculthorpe, Winsome Evans and Nicholas Routley, I had little more than a dab hand at pastiche, which was just the ticket when the Sydney University Dramatic Society needed some incidental music.

That’s where I met Dennis, who was subsidising an Arts/Law degree by working as an Opera House tour guide. He was full of stories and gossip about the building, but these took second place to the “tasteless and epic” musicals (like the Titanic/Poseidon Adventure hybrid The Iceberg Cometh, to which I contributed a few songs) that he created for the annual Student Union Review. The notion that there “might be a show” in the origin story of Utzon’s flawed masterpiece (loved for different reasons but in the same measure by two lower-middle-class boys) never left him though, and fifteen years after we went our separate ways, director Jim Sharman brought us back together to make it happen. By then Dennis had added rigorous research and dramaturgy to his flare for characterisation and spectacle (he would often start from the premise of what fantastic tableau he would love to see on stage). Camp of course still played a part, as it does in many great libretti, and those aspects of post-war Australia that Patrick White found so apt for satire were also intricately bound up in this pageant. What Dennis proposed was a very big mural to paint, and the grotesque and the heroic had to stand alongside the ‘ordinary’ among its dense crowd.

So, one of the opera’s meta-stories is that of its authors. If you read through the other observations, you’ll see that many others were just as easily able to project their experiences of this era onto the work. The members of the chorus and many principals in the original production saw it as the story of the opera company that they helped bring to life and which nurtured them. “Madame Magda” was entirely an invention of Dennis’s, but singers swore she was the image of Marianne (“Madame”) Mathy, the German-Jewish coloratura Malcolm Sargent had persuaded to emigrate to Sydney in 1939, where she remained a remarkably influential singing teacher for three decades. My dear, now departed, friend Richard Gill had me bellowing along with his laughter at shared cringeworthy memories of Sydney in the sixties, where lorries decorated with crepe-paper flowers inching their way down George Street in the Waratah Festival Parade were the closest thing to culture for most of us.

Post-modernist argot is equally wince-inducing , but I must add that there’s another “meta” dimension to the piece: it’s also to do with history, but not the specific period that is depicted on stage.

The opera took me three and a half years to complete. That time coincided with the prime ministership of the Australian Labor Party’s Paul Keating. He won an unexpected second term as I was mid-way through the orchestrations. While far from starry-eyed about him, I found his zeal for reform, especially in the area of Aboriginal Land Rights, together with his reverence for music and optimism about the future of Australian artistic endeavour, pretty exciting. As unimaginable as the opening night of The Eighth Wonder seemed as I slogged away in the dead of night, I always imagined Keating in the audience. The portrayal of Premier Cahill is based on him. The opening of Scene 12, in which a ceremony is held to celebrate the completion of the shells, is based on a real event in which Liberal and Country Party ministers were embarrassed by the workers unfurling a Builders Labourers Federation flag from the topmost peak. In the first production, a gigantic Southern Cross tumbled from the actual ceiling of the opera theatre as the chorus reached its climax. Hideous neo-fascist baggage would prevent it today but the effect was spine-chilling then, a harbinger of the new Republic of Australia that was surely only a few years away. I raced to the opening night function hoping to meet him, only to be introduced instead to a good friend of the then Opera Australia’s general manager Donald MacDonald. My heart sank as I struggled for a few minutes to talk about cricket with John Howard: within months, the new PM, nemesis of the Republic and, arguably, of Australian Culture. Again, Idealism dies on the altar of Pragmatism. The cycle repeats, but the story remains ripe for re-telling.

I have composed two chamber operas, three large-scale music theatre pieces and an opera (rather impractically) written for sixty children, teenagers and young adults, but The Eighth Wonder remains my “magnum opus”. Up until recently, it was the only opera by an Australian composer to have “entered the repertoire”, a phrase whose apotheotic ring clatters to earth when translated to: five performances in 1995, four in a 2000 revival and another six in a truncated outdoor version in 2016. That’s at least 10 more outings than most composers get, and I’m genuinely indebted to Opera Australia for wholeheartedly setting forth down such a risky and expensive path so comparably often. But while this work has fallen outside the regrettable norm for Australian music, that is, an under-rehearsed “first and only performance”, for me a regret has remained: the lack of any accessible audio-archive of the piece.

In the premiere season of October 1995 director Neil Armfield called on some heavyweights to pull whatever ABC strings they could in order to have the opera documented, and the production went to air in a hastily convened television/FM radio ‘simulcast’ on its second night (always the direst date for any show). It was plagued by technical and human mishaps. I remember sitting in the broadcast van covering my eyes as veteran tenor Robert Gard (playing Premier Cahill) dredged up the word “laundry” at one point to cover a mental blank: “And I venture to predict that no…laundry will attempt to make an issue of it”.

No other complete recording exists. The 2000 pre-Olympics version was unarchived and, while it featured a convincing Architect in high-baritone Grant Smith, it was in any case compromised by the fact that his melodic lines had to be substantially re-written to accommodate the new tessitura. The 2016 production was re-conceived to be staged outdoors, on the Opera House steps. Sponsored by Sennheiser it was an experimental “silent opera”: soloists with in-ear fold back, orchestra and chorus beamed in from within the building and an audience listening via headphone mix. If you took off your headsets- and I saw several punters doing this-it was a surreal acapella experience. Decibel-wise it was far from the Crowded House Farewell gig, but a 10.30 curfew still had to be adhered to. This was to avoid a) offending the residents of the luxury apartments that had sprung up several decades post-Utzon (one of whom was a prominent Sydney shock-jock) and b) the musicians going into overtime. Consequently, about forty minutes of cuts were made. Dennis and I painfully acquiesced to most of them in advance, but a few unauthorised amendments became apparent to us only at the first and final dress rehearsal.

The cast was superb (my dream of finding some notional Scandinavian heldentenor in the mould of Jussi Björling to play the character based on Utzon was even fulfilled) and the orchestral mix and balance outstanding. To my ears, however, the live recording was rendered unlistenable by the decision to replace so many composed sequences with spoken dialogue. Hearing a great opera singer speaking lines is a very good illustration of the concept of bathos. From Mt. Olympus to High School hall in the blink of an eye.

So when my composer friend Stephen Rae phoned me out of the blue in 2020 to ask why he couldn’t listen to it “on Spotify” I had to explain that nobody could listen to it anywhere. Months of dogged effort by Stephen on my behalf has led to this website, which not only provides a definitive recording but also includes the finally completed typeset full score produced by composer, singer, musician and poly-math Philip Griffin. Philip was racing to complete this in the lead up to opening night 25 years ago, but Maestro Gill had already marked up his handwritten full score and so decided to conduct from that. As I’ve never had a publisher, no funds were allocated for him to complete the task, let alone address the hundreds of corrections and alterations that had accrued over the first rehearsal period.

The bulk of the recording is taken from the 2016 performance that was streamed on ABC Classic FM. Stephen acquired the strictly not-for-profit rights to this, and we are both extremely grateful to the ABC, Opera Australia, all the performers involved, and to the genius of sound-designer/engineer Tony David-Cray. The missing links come from a range of sources:

In 2001 the wonderful Tom Woods (who was assistant chorus-master on the original production and is currently Music Director at the Regensburg Opera in Germany) took the Sydney Youth Orchestra and six soloists on a tour of Denmark with a concert version (by necessity shortened and slightly reorchestrated), which by serendipity was recorded in a hall designed by Utzon himself. If you are jolted by the sudden arrival of a reverberant acoustic , or changes of cast that take place over the course of a single note, please put it down to my having to edit from Denmark to Sydney and back again. Heartfelt thanks are due to the talented and committed cast and players who took part in Tom’s noble exercise in artistic diplomacy between the Nordic and Antipodean realms.

Other sections were recorded in a studio to a “virtual orchestra” made as lifelike as possible by Sydney composer and orchestrator Matthew Chin. While other states remained in COVID lockdown, fortune shone on South Australia last September and I was able to employ some fine Adelaide-based singers, including the illustrious mezzo Elizabeth Campbell.

I invite you to listen while following the score, the libretto or, (my choice) with eyes closed and the theatre of your imagination at play.