Bells, chants, prayers, the scrape of chairs at table, the hum of a
vacuum, the splash of a sink being plunged: the soundscape of
Goldenstein Cloister is equal parts liturgy and daily life. Layer
onto that the laughter of eighty-something sisters sharing coffee,
the creak of a chairlift, the slap of running shoes from Sister
Rita’s daily 5K after prayer, and you begin to hear what’s at
stake in Austria right now.
The Augustinian choir women of
Goldenstein had spent their lives in this convent—decades of vows
that they believed bound the Church as much as themselves. And then,
dissolution. Closure. The doors shut on their home, the place where
they had lived out obedience, prayer, and community. Their leader
called it a “necessary act of care.” But care for whom? Care, in
this telling, seems less about human dignity and more about ease of
management. (There may be a plausible “other side” to the story, but when your church leader argues that orthopedic shoes are a violation of the vow of poverty, somebody hasn’t thought about how decisions about elders read in the broader universe.)
What these sisters assert is simple and
radical: their vows were two-way. The Church has responsibilities
here. And the sisters and their supporters are claiming them.The
three Augustinian sisters—Rita, Bernadette, and Regina—repossessed
their cloister earlier this month. That sparked a cascade of
attention: a podcast episode, a BBC story, Guardian coverage, and a
flourishing Instagram feed that pairs black-and-white habits with
splashes of bright flowers and cheerful captions in German and
English.
What I hear in all this isn’t only the
sound of bells or the chant of the office. It’s the sound of
determination, of voices raised in defense of their rights, of a
community that has chosen to rally around them. On-site helpers
showed up with brooms and mops to scrub the convent back into
habitability. Supporters—English and German alike—comment on
their posts, write emails, show up at Mass. And even when there is no
priest to say Mass, the sisters sing the rosary together, because
prayer continues regardless of who is willing to stand at the altar.
Why bring this story here?
First: because it’s a rare window into
monastic life today, with all its joy, grit, and creativity.
Second: because some of you may want to
follow them online or even donate. They’re @nonnen_goldenstein on
Instagram, and their captions read like tiny table-prayers,
interspersed with photos of a community refusing to fade quietly
away.
Third: because it’s a living parable
of resistance. For those of us who study monastic history, it’s not
every day that we get a real-life #NunsOnTheRun story unfolding in
our time. These sisters have claimed their right to remain, to pray,
to belong. The least we can do is listen, and perhaps add our voices
in support.
Their own social media team has a
bouquet of hashtags: #nunsontherun #goldenstein #augustinerchorfrauen
#churchfluencer #nonnen #klosterleben #elsbethen #fyp #gästebuch
#guestbook #willkommen #youarewelcome. Give them a follow. Raise up
your voice for the dignity and self-determination of those who have
faithfully served. Support their renewed convent soundscape. After
all, the soundscape of Goldenstein is not just liturgy or
rebellion—it’s the sound of life insisted upon, carried forward,
and sung into being.
Image includes the 6-box screen of characters and their fictional names
Today’s contribution is a review of a pandemic opera – one
that I’ve just taught in my Music, Pandemics, and History class. Since not a
lot has been written about the opera yet, I thought this overview might be
helpful to the interested reader.
In the middle of the pandemic, the creative team of David
Shenton and Christine Steyer took on the lived experience of COVID-19 directly.
They focused their three-scene / one-hour opera on the voices of healthcare
workers. Their information was, as they explain, well-researched, “drawn from
200 articles about health care workers facing the pandemic.” While news as
opera may seem surprising, questions of moral codes and strong emotion –
especially tension, fear, and hope – emerge from the script as part of its operatic landscape. By the end, we care for
the characters, as one should, and have traveled their story arc – from angst
to connectedness and from outrage to hope. It is, as critics note, an “operatic
love letter to global front-line healthcare workers.” The opera was also deemed
successful by judges, for the first production was the winner of the National
Opera Association Production Award and garnered 3rd place in the 2022 American
Prize for Opera Production.
Set as a zoom call, the operatic performance cleverly begins
with that moment of recognition: “Please wait. The host will let you in soon.”
Yes, we all came to know that phrase all too well during the early stages of
the pandemic. Likewise, as we move into the first scene, the mood of melancholy
set by the Overture gives way to a frenetically repeated piano, underscoring
the urgency in which the characters have been immersed. We meet the various
characters, especially Sandra, the RN who has convened the group out of near-overwhelming
frustration and a need for connection.
In this first aria, Sandra describes the nominal perks
accorded the frontline workers, including fancy hotels and invitations to jump
the queue (!), but points out “it all comes down to nothing” because she’s not
able to see her own family. She snapped, she tells us, when the hospital
started talking about pay cuts because of the lack of elective procedures. Pay
cuts? In the middle of a pandemic? So her frustration boiled over into the need
for this call/this opera.
The opera is divided into three scenes set several months
apart: “Of the Heart”; “Just when things couldn’t get Worse” and “Tell Me
Something Good.” Within each scene, several of the six healthcare working
characters will share some part of their COVID-related experiences; Paolo,
in “Fratelli” (I.3 – 17:25) explains the Italian penchant for balcony singing
and its historical grounding, Gordon uses a refrain aria to articulate
the frustration with a lack of progress in “One step forward” (II.2); Jane
questions what we are all inheriting as a society, and whether it’s actually the
good place that she was raised to see (“I’ve always been taught to respect my
elders,” II.4).
Elements of the contextual news for the pandemic also peak
through – for instance, Gordon’s experience (II.2) with the Beirut
explosions, and Rolanda’swith deforestation in the Amazon, and
the spaces it left for graves (II.3). A concatenation of negatives layers up in
the closing part of scene 2, where five of the six characters pile on with
their anger and worries about the way in which the pandemic has unfolded, until
Sandra calls a halt to it all.
CLIMAX AND RESOLUTION (AN EXCERPT)
In fact, if you only have ten minutes to sample the opera,
this climax and its resolution across the boundary of the entr’acte into scene
3 is the part of the opera that I think is perhaps the most worth viewing. This
section follows Jane’s aria, previously mentioned, where she balances respect
for her elders and dismay at behaviors that have led us to the current moment
with its multitudinous ills (39:24). Ultimately, she tells us (40:07), she
finds herself “unable to remain silent.” The Ensemble joins in for a group
layering up of concerns: (41:00) “the World leaders protected from
accountability… (42:29) deny responsibility and find a scapegoat…” The libretto
goes on to distinguish problems from dilemmas: “problems have solutions; dilemmas
don’t.” And the pandemic for many countries is a dilemma. This leads into the
climax, which is where we pick up:
The excerpt itself features several returning lines. At the start
of the excerpt (45:00), we hear how the virus “brought planet to its knees.”
And that in turn raises the repeated question, “…how did we come to this?” The
layers of concern, each character adding thoughts and observations into a
cacophony of stress, reaches a climax, prompting Sandra to intervene (45:41),
saying “Stop, please, please, enough!” These calls began, she reminds everyone,
as “a space for me to share,” and after making a claim for the usefulness of connections,
asks the other characters to “promise me you will tell me something good” when
they return.
As the excerpt continues, we segue (46:56) into a keyboard
entr'acte, designed to shifts our mood for the upcoming arrival of the new
year. It’s “Hard to believe” (47:33) that it’s been almost a year, the
characters observe at the start of Scene three. After toasting the new year
with wine and water, the characters share positive updates. Sandra has
just gotten a second dose of the vaccine so is able to return home to her
family; Mario speaks to the legacy of learning that he has from his
grandmother, whose advice helped get him through a difficult delivery (50:06).
It is a different sound-world than the echo-chamber scapegoating at the end of
the previous scene.
THE REST OF THE OPERA
I’ve ended the excerpt there with Mario and his grandma, but
further positive news then continues to unfold across the third scene – the
availability of vaccines, the recognized wisdom as a legacy of a beloved
grandparent, volunteers helping with ventilators. Sandra perhaps sums it
up best: “it all comes down to nothing if there’s no one to share.” The opera ends
with an ensemble number from our main characters: “Microbes older than us” and
its second part, “We are healers.” The close is provided in memoriam
with a virtual choir.
OPERA OVERVIEW
A viewer-based (rather than score-based) summary of the
opera’s structure looks something like this:
Overture
Scene 1: Of the Heart (early April, 2020)
1.Sandra’s aria
2.Mario: “We called her Lily”
3.Paolo: Fratelli
4.Jane: O what an awful blight
5.[Gordon and Rolanda passim]
Scene
2: Just When Things Couldn’t Get Worse (early September, 2020)
1.[Action: report on Beirut, Paulo]
2.Gordon: “refrain aria” “One step forward…”
3.Rolanda “Amazonia from above”
4.Jane: I’ve always been taught to respect my
elders
5.ENSEMBLE: Scapegoat
6.[Stop, enough.] >>>
Scene
3: Tell Me Something Good (New Year’s Eve, 2020)
1.Sandra: 2nd vaccination
2.Mario: Hard delivery; grandma Lily
3.Jane: Family & pictures of the hospital
4.Paolo: sung to high A
5.Rolanda: volunteers help with ventilator
6.Gordon: y’all
7.Sandra: it all comes down to nothing if there’s no
one to share
8.ENSEMBLE: Microbes older than us
9.ENSEMBLE: We are healers
10.In
memoriam (choral)
THE OPERA'S CONTEXT
As A.A. Cristi noted in their initial review, the opera not
only told a significant story, but also provided a “meaningful project” for the
singers “who have been hard-pressed to find work during the pandemic.” To
record the opera, composer and pianist David Shenton laid down the piano
tracks, which the singers used as they recorded their own parts – safely, and
at home. Those samples were then merged as a single soundtrack, at which point
production turned to the video portion. The singers were asked to lip sync, pretending
to sing on Zoom, as Schering captures in his news coverage of the premiere.
In fact, the executive producer situates this performance
for us in the playbill: “We have yet to meet in person.” This counts as a “remote
ensemble” production. The relatively small forces – the orchestra is a piano
and sometimes violin, and six singers in gender-flexible casting – reflect the
challenges inherent in all our various “safer at home” quarantines impacted
music-making world-wide.
Overall, this one-act is a remarkably approachable 21st
century opera, and has proven an effective entre to the genre for the non-music
majors I’ve taught. The musical structure with its occasional use of refrains
and its clear accompanimental markers to distinguish one section from another
is relatively easy to follow. There’s perhaps more arioso than aria writing,
but this keeps the action and events of the story line at its center. The singing
of this performance is wonderfully done; my students voted for Paolo as the
singer they’d most like to hear again. (It also helps that we’d just finished a
unit on balcony music, and here it was, brought to life!)
Overall, the operatic takeaway is pretty simple: “kindness
and compassion can be as powerful a tool as a vaccine and a ventilator.” Not a
bad message for troubled times.
RESOURCES:
Complete first performance of Shenton/Steyer’s On Call: COVID-19 (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDb70FfOSMc. This video can also be accessed through the Bellissima Opera website.
