Tuesday, 3 December 2024
Government House Sydney
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

Bujari gamarruwa

Diyn Babana Gamarada Gadigal Ngura

I welcome you using Gadigal words of greeting as I pay my respects to Gadigal Elders, past, present and emerging. These Gadigal words remind us that our presence builds upon a vibrant music and song tradition that has flourished on this land for tens of thousands of years.

Tonight, we gather in the Ballroom, which in 1834 was designated as the ‘music room’ in architect Edward Blore’s original set of 97 working drawings for Government House. If you look up to the ceiling, Lyon, Cottier & Co’s Aesthetic designs of musical instruments - lute, harp, drums and pipes - added in 1879, pays homage to this musical intention.

Almost 25 years ago, a similar forward-thinking impulse – to secure the future ‘architecture’ of Australian opera, led Opera Australia to create a capital fund.

The establishment of the Opera Australia Capital Fund was a landmark in the arts and arts funding in Australia.

Since that time, the Fund has helped Opera Australia withstand everything that the new millennium has thrown our way – including box office fluctuations, a global financial crisis, a pandemic and our current cost-of-living crisis. Importantly, it has enabled a continuing program of innovation and excellence, nurturing this country’s finest young talent, while reaching regional audiences, and introducing the magic of opera to new generations. 

And what a year of magic it has been! Theodora, Orpheus and Eurydice, La Traviata, the incomparable West Side Story on Sydney Harbour, Tosca, Hamlet, Sunset Boulevard, to name just a few, and, of course, the recent Gilgamesh, a world premiere of the ‘world’s oldest poem by opera’s most cutting-edge artists.’

This year, Opera Australia has performed in 19 regional areas, including, here in NSW: Wagga Wagga; Goulburn; Dubbo; Tamworth; Armidale; Port Macquarie; Wyong; Newcastle and Wollongong.  The Fund is integral to ensuring we have the artists to perform regionally, where, our experience is that there is a huge thirst for wonderful music.

As any arts company knows – certainty about the future is a rare commodity. So ‘shoring up’ support for the magnificence of opera and the artists who are its lifeblood - the performers, artists, musicians, costumiers, set designers and technicians – is critical.

Next year, we will celebrate 25 years of the Capital Fund’s support which has allowed Opera Australia’s program to grow and expand in new and exciting ways, significantly extending its artform and increasing performance and audience numbers. This is an anniversary which gives us all a great sense of optimism  for the future of opera in Australia.

Tonight, we recognise and thank each of you, the Fund’s generous donors and supporters, whose visionary support has made this lasting impact, securing Opera Australia’s continuing success.

But, of course, as with anything to do with the dramatic or operatic arts, there can always be some unexpected drama ...  Two years before the founding of the colony of New South Wales, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro premiered at the Burgtheatre in Vienna.  According to the newspaper Wiener Realzeitung, the opera was greeted with “many a bravo from unbiased connoisseurs, but obstreperous louts in the uppermost storey exerted their hired lungs with all their might to deafen singers and audience.”^[1]

Although we have a Minstrel’s gallery overlooking the Ballroom, I am sure that tonight there will be no such risk!  

And now for half an hour of sheer enjoyment. 

[1] Quoted in Deutsch, Otto Erich (1965). Mozart: A Documentary Biography. Stanford University Press: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marriage_of_Figaro