Artist in Focus: Olga Neuwirth

About Olga Neuwirth

Olga Neuwirth was born in 1968 in Graz, Austria and studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and San Francisco Conservatory of Music, also studying painting and film at San Francisco Art College.  Her composition teachers included Adriana Hölszky, Elinor Armer, Tristan Murail and Luigi Nono.

For over 30 years Neuwirth’s works have explored a wide range of forms and genres: operas, radio plays, artworks, photography, film music and sound installations. In many works she fuses live musicians, electronics, audio and video into unique audiovisual experiences. She has been raising her voice against social and political inequalities and supporting the promotion of underrepresented female composers since the late 1980s. Highlights include two portrait concerts at the Salzburg Festival (1998); Clinamen/Nodus for Pierre Boulez and the London Symphony Orchestra (2000); her multimedia operas Baa-Lambs Feast (1993/1998), after Leonora Carrington, and Lost Highway (2003), after David Lynch, which won a South Bank Show Award (ENO at the Young Vic, 2008); composer-in-residence at the Lucerne Festival in 2002 and 2016; two operas while living in New York (2010/11) — The Outcast: Homage to Herman Melville and American Lulu, based on Alban Berg’s Lulu; and Masaot/Clocks without Hands (2014), written as a commemoration of her grandfather, a refugee, for the Vienna Philharmonic under Daniel Harding.

In 2020 Keyframes for a Hippogriff for orchestra, countertenor and children’s chorus was commissioned by New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Stockholm Philharmonic and BBC Proms, with performances taking place during the Covid pandemic when conditions allowed.

Neuwirth’s opera Orlando, after Virginia Woolf, was premiered at the Vienna State Opera in December 2019; she was the first woman commissioned in the 150-year history of the house. Orlando was the winner of the 2022 Grawemeyer Award and the work was released on DVD on the label Unitel. Among numerous prizes, she was awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize together with Stevie Wonder and in 2022 she was given another prestigious award, the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize.