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FIRST PERFORMANCES
Unsuk Chin's opera Alice in Wonderland is that rare thing: a wholly satisfying artistic event, its multiplicity of meanings resonating in the mind long after the ceaselessly inventive music itself comes to a stop. Most adaptations of such wide-ranging texts focus on one or two aspects of the original, and Chin and her librettist, the playwright David Henry Hwang, sacrifice much of Carroll's playfulness to darken and deepen his message. Their Wonderland retains his virtuosic whimsy, of necessity, but ultimately becomes a fierce, unforgiving, savagely dysfunctional place, as if sieved through Beckett's absurdist nihilism; the humour tiptoes along the edge of an abyss, glancing down nervously.
Hwang's libretto breaks Carroll's text down into six scenes, framed by a prologue and epilogue of his own devising; it brings some of the language up to date and re-orients its philosophical enquiries within a world which regards the scientific certainties of modernism with a quizzical, post-modern eye. So this was an Alice of our own times, not an evocation of Charles Dodgson's Victorian world - but just as Dodgson kicked against the traces of his own day, so does this retelling: no small part of its success lies in its determined undermining of certainties; you leave the hall looking over your shoulder.
Alice in Wonderland was commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera, but financial difficulties meant that it was premiered at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, under the baton of Kent Nagano, in June 2007.1It wasn't Chin's first creative encounter with Carroll: some of the texts in her Acrostic Wordplay (1991, rev. 1993) came from Alice through the...