As the first opera by a woman commissioned and presented by the Vienna State Opera, Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando, “a fictional musical biography in 19 scenes”, was headline news even before its premiere in 2019. Neuwirth and her librettist Catherine Filloux’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s story of an Elizabethan aristocrat who travels through four centuries, switching genders en route, extends the chronology of the novel from 1928, the year of its publication, through to the present day, taking in the Holocaust and the second world war, the social upheavals of the 1960s and the consumerism and greed of the 80s, right up to the rightwing populism of Trump.
