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Best Performance Program | 2001
'Death of a composer' opera was premiered at the Netherlands Opera in 1994. This filmed performance is from June 1998.
In "Who's My Bottom?" book, Christopher Gillett recalled his experience in acting in this opera, playing one of two bad guys required to rape the soprano in the disembowelled carcass of a horse. "After lying successfully about my riding abilities I was shown a sort of screenplay, which was to be the basis of the opera that was yet to be written. One stage direction stood out: 'They fuck her inside the horse'. That's not a line you often see in opera I must say," Gillett wrote. Then talking with Peter Greenaway about the rape scene, the director asked Gillett how far he's willing to go. "My fellow bad guy, Roger, asks: 'How does it work that we actually fuck her inside the horse?' Roger is Dutch you see. He's quite happy to start saying 'fuck' from the get-go. Peter explains that Marie, the soprano, will be inside the disembowelled abdominal area of a (fake) horse and we will climb up the back and take her/them from behind." During the rehearsal, Gillett realizes that the director was not kidding. "I climb the ladder while Greenaway looks on. I lift the tail and notice that the mare is - how can I put it? - anatomically correct. I could, if I so desired, reach through the horse's vagina into the inside of the cavity where Marie will be stuffed. I remember our earlier meeting.[...]The only reason I can fathom that the vagina is functional, so to speak, is just in case we had told Greenaway that we were willing to go the whole hog'. " Gillett wrote that when Marie Angel knew Greenaway's intentions, "she tells him: 'well, no-one is sticking anything in!'.
Australian soprano Marie Angel, as Esmeralda, not only spends most of the time on stage in the nude, but she also gets spanked and groped. Angel said she saw the sexual violence and humiliation suffered by Esmeralda as a form of denunciation. "Taking your clothes off on stage shouldn't be shocking," she said of her role. "But we should be shocked by what happens to Esmeralda."
