When she learned the news — announced on Monday by the University of Louisville, which administers the award — Neuwirth, 53, was on the phone with someone else and didn’t know how to respond to a mysterious call.
The work — a subversive blurring of genre, time and politics reflecting on how little has changed over the centuries, yet how much change is possible — jolted the generally conservative Vienna State Opera.
Woolf’s novel, a fantastical parody of biographies, follows its forever-young protagonist through the centuries: from Orlando’s years as a favorite of Elizabeth I to the book’s publication in 1928.
Neuwirth’s opera goes another step further, taking the plot to the present — a world facing climate crisis, the rise of nationalism and the persistence of the patriarchy — and looking toward a better future.
Her “Orlando” covers several hundred years over three hours, with a score of smoothly fleeting stylistic shifts and disorientingly fuzzy instrumental distinctions — what Neuwirth has described as a kind of androgyny in sound.
Neuwirth studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, then at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Her next opera, “Manga for Lovers” — whose team includes the “Lost Highway” screenwriter Barry Gifford, the innovative director Yuval Sharon and the soprano Julia Bullock — had been planned for the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris next fall, but was canceled, with no new opening in sight.