Tesla - Lightning in His Hand

Tesla – Lightning in His Hand is a large-scale opera about Serbian American scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943), composed by Tasmanian (Australian) composer Constantine Koukias (1965-), with libretto by Marianne Fisher.

The full opera was produced in 2003 by IHOS Music Theatre and Opera, described at the time by Vincent Plush of Gramophone magazine as having created "a quiet operatic revolution in Hobart since its formation in 1990".[1] There was nothing quiet, however, about the Tesla coil that was among the work's most notable props at its premiere.[2] A warning was issued in the program to audience members who might be wearing "pace-makers, hearing aides, or any form of electric, magnetic, mechanical or metallic implant or prosthetic device".

Tesla was one of the least recognised scientific pioneers in history, though his inventions formed the basis of modern industry. His developments in energy, such as the AC current, the polyphase motor and the wireless, catapulted the world into the automotive age. The opera follows the repeated reversals of fortunes of this charismatic and eccentric man who was, for a time, the darling of the New York set. Throughout his career he was variously championed and cheated by his shrewder peers and rivals, most memorably Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. As a scientist Tesla was controversial; as a businessman he was a dismal failure. In Tesla - Lightning in His Hand, "the electrical engineer's life and the intensity of his research is conveyed by the sense of escalating drama through the production".[3]

Tesla - Lightning in His Hand was originally commissioned by the West Australian Opera and developed over three years through two staged "works in development". Creator and original Artistic Director of Tasmania's 10 Days on the Island Festival, Robyn Archer, commissioned the full opera to open the festival in 2003. In keeping with audience expectations of IHOS, built up through the innovation and spectacle of productions such as Days and Nights with Christ and To Traverse Water,[4] the work, sponsored by the John Holland Group, was staged in a massive shed on Hobart's docks, where the Tesla coils put on a "spectacular display of electron sparks".[5] Reviewing the production for the Melbourne Age, David Lander described it as "gorgeous image-based performance art with a fascinating, brittle score in which dilemmas are ignored in favour of sensuality".[6]

The two-hour work, sung in English, is in two parts and features a bass, a tenor, a bass-baritone, two sopranos, seven musicians (including a theremin player) and a large male choir. Throughout Part 1, "the baritone and bass voices rise up in indecipherable incantations which weave through the plaintive and lyrical strains of an oboe".[7] Also audible are clattering typewriters, pigeons (in later life Tesla was deeply affected by the death of a specific white pigeon), Morse code and fragments of Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony.

Tesla was featured on ABC Classic FM's New Music Australia program[8] and has been cited as far afield as Croatia, where it was noted in a tourist board tribute to the scientist[9] and Croatian Post's web page detailing a stamp to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the inventor's birth.[10]

2003 Production Credits

References

  1. ↑ Plush, Vincent 2003, Gramophone, 28 March 2008
  2. ↑ Kennedy, Susanne 2003, "Lightning conductor: IHOS' Tesla", RealTime Magazine, February-March 2003
  3. ↑ Knights, Mary 2000, "Images from the Life of Nikola Tesla", Siglo, Issue 13, Winter 2000
  4. ↑ Shevtsova, Maria 1996, "Greek-Australian Odysseys in a Multicultural World", Performing Arts Journal 52, vol. 18 no. 1, pp. 64-70
  5. ↑ Tesla Memorial Society of New York circa 2003, "Nikola Tesla Opera"
  6. ↑ Lader, David 2003, "Evocation of Eccentricity", The Age, 2 April 2003
  7. ↑ Knights, Mary 2000, op. cit.
  8. ↑ New Music Australia 2003, "Tesla - Lightning in His Hand", ABC Classic FM, 13 August 2003
  9. ↑ The Croatia National Tourist Board n.d., "The Mediterranean As It Once Was: Honours".
  10. ↑ Croatian Post Inc. 2006, 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Nikola Tesla

External links