Jane Austen
Kia ora koutou and nau mai haere mai to the very first instalment of Stage Notes for the 2025 season of New Zealand Opera.
If you attended any of our operas throughout 2024, it’s highly likely that you’ll be familiar with Stage Notes – and if not, welcome! This is the series where we dive a little deeper into the works set to hit our stages, detailing their origins, reputations and the nitty-gritty details of how we bring them to life.
Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park was the sleeper hit of our 2024 season – an intimate, sparkling chamber opera that delighted sold-out Auckland and Wellington houses across its limited season last year. And so, with its South Island debut season kicking off in just three weeks, we thought now was the perfect time to dive a little deeper into this very special work.
Austen’s first mature novel
The Austen who penned Mansfield Park, then, was one much sharper and more keenly aware of the various tensions and divides present in the England of which she wrote. The result is a work sometimes termed “controversial” by Austen’s standards, but one whose wit and incisive commentary remains effective more than two centuries after its publication. The Austen who penned Mansfield Park, then, was one much sharper and more keenly aware of the various tensions and divides present in the England of which she wrote. The result is a work sometimes termed “controversial” by Austen’s standards, but one whose wit and incisive commentary remains effective more than two centuries after its publication.
Controversial…..but why?
Good question! If you’ve read Austen, or even just seen one of the many adaptations of her many esteemed works, you’ll probably know that we’re not talking about the incursion of anything that’d be considered within shouting distance of ‘beyond the pale’ by modern standards.
Rather, that reputation hangs largely on the character of Miss Price herself – and on the inability of readers, academics and literary critics over the past couple of centuries to quite pin down exactly what moves and motivates this story’s famously interior protagonist. As Tara Burton detailed in a deeply thoughtful piece for The Paris Review, for years Fanny’s detractors were many; their critiques almost admirably diverse. Contemporary critic Reginald Farrer denounced her as “repulsive in her cast-iron self-righteousness”; German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche shook his head at what he termed her “moralistic” bent; even Austen’s own mother dismissed our heroine as ‘insipid’!
Looking through fresh eyes
Of course, as times change, so too do minds. It’s probably unsurprising then, that modern perspectives tend to lean somewhat more sympathetic to our understated heroine – Austen biographer Claire Tomalin notably said of her quiet rebellion against the Bertrams’ wishes, “it is in rejecting obedience in favour of the higher dictate of remaining true to her own conscience that Fanny rises to her moment of heroism”.
Jonathan Dove, Composer
In that same Paris Review piece, Burton argues in that same piece that Fanny’s distinct contrast from Austen’s more traditional heroines is both deeply deliberate and subtly political; that by writing Fanny in this way, “Austen challenges us to read with a sharper eye to social class, and how such class informs her work as a whole.”
For Mansfield Park composer Jonathan Dove, that more charitable interpretation is clearly the one which resonates. Writing for The Guardian in 2017, Dove spoke of “hear[ing] music” when he first read Austen’s work; that music, to his mind’s ear, giving voice to the shy, circumspect Fanny: “Austen offers clues to her feelings, but unlike the lively Emma Woodhouse or the high-spirited Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny does not express them. To me, her reticence invited music, a way of revealing those hidden emotions.”
A most ingenious contrivance
That was how Max Rashbrooke described our 2024 season of Mansfield Park, in an altogether glowing review for The Post. And certainly, transposing one of Austen’s compactly sprawling worlds into a work that can be performed by just ten singers and two pianists in a breezy couple of hours is some feat indeed. But as NZ Opera Tumu Whakarae Brad Cohen made clear in his 2024 programme notes, Mansfield Park is far more than a mere academic exercise:
“Mansfield Park embodies the core of opera as a narrative art form,” he wrote, “Not through surface glamour and fripperies, but a story told in a single room, a story about the power of quiet and intimacy. Opera takes many forms, and always has; the form it takes in Mansfield Park is distinctive, and I think, distinguished.”
Rebecca Meltzer, Director
As its capacity audiences from last season can attest, Mansfield Park is a very special piece indeed. And so we’re enormously excited to be not only bringing it to the South Island for the very first time, but to be doing so with an almost entirely unchanged cast – save for Michaela Cadwgan, who rises to the role of Fanny Price after a star turn as Julia Bertram in last year’s show, and Cecelia Zhang who we’re delighted to welcome to the cast as our ‘new’ Julia.
This may be opera as you’ve rarely seen it, but if you’re a lover of this form, the power, the beauty and the emotion will all be entirely familiar. We can’t wait to share it with you.
