Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

She, Who Should Have Been a Queen (2024), my third song cycle, 1 continues a sustained engagement with themes of gendered experience and female subjectivity explored in earlier works including Art & Life (1999), 2 concerned with domestic violence, and Winter Came Early (2022), which examines the mother-daughter relationship within the dislocations of migration and cultural otherness. 3 In this cycle, soprano Antoinette Halloran's texts revisit canonical female operatic figures through a distinctly twenty-first-century feminist lens, interrogating inherited narratives of agency, power, sacrifice, and representation. Halloran's extensive performance experience in many of these iconic roles provided an important interpretative and dramaturgical foundation for the work.

Work Details

Year: 2024

Instrumentation: Soprano, piano.

Duration: 40 min.

Contents note: 1. “Lady Macbeth on a Soapbox at Last” after Verdi’s Macbeth -- 2. “The Nurse’s Curse….in retrospect, or, She Who Should Have Been a Queen” after Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet -- 3. “Pinkerton’s Lament” after Puccini’s Madama Butterfly -- 4. “Buttercup and the Cruel Stomp of Time” after Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore -- 5. “Just Gilda” after Verdi’s Rigoletto -- 6. “Musetta’s Schmaltz” after Puccini’s La Bohème -- 7. “The Snake’s Persssspective: A Revisionist Commentary on The Drover’s Wife” after Mills’ The Ghost Wife

Commission note: Commissioned by Coady Green, Antoinette Halloran with funds provided by City of Melbourne.