Il giudizio di Pigmalione (2022)

• Opera In 1 Act (Libretto: D. Burry with Italian translation by Sara Maida-Nicol
• 3 sopranos, 2 mezzo-sopranos, 1 tenor, 1 baritone, women’s chorus and chamber orchestra
• Commissioned by COSI, 2014
• Premiered November 4, 2022 Opera McGill, Montreal

The opera Il Giudizio di Pigmalione (The Judgment of Pygmalion) and was inspired by the myth of the sculpture Pygmalion as told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis:

“He made, with marvellous art, an ivory statue, As white as snow, and gave it greater beauty Than any girl could have, and fell in love with his own workmanship.”

The opera is scored for seven soloists, women’s chorus, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, piano and strings. This setting of the myth (the libretto by the composer, with Italian translation by Sara Maida-Nicol) places the sculptor Pygmalion as an Italian high-fashion magazine photo editor disgusted by Women’s Rights marchers who protest around him: a modern interpretation of the classical Propoetides. Photo editing techniques, including filtering, warping, cropping, layering, transparency, colour adjustment and cutting and pasting, are all incorporated into the score which explores, through tonality and dissonance, a violent dichotomy between equal human rights and traditional roles and models of women in society.

Ovid’s story, and the opera’s libretto, builds on the idea of perfectionism. The ancient Greek notion of the golden ratio or divine proportion (1.618) has been exploited to rigidly define beauty for centuries and also is woven into the score of the opera, subtly influencing duration, harmony and texture. Il Giudizo di Pigmalione theatrically and musically portrays the conflict for and against feminism, struggling against the kind of attitudes fostered both by Ovid’s myth two thousand years ago and the digitally altered, and influential, images so ubiquitous in modern media.