THE STORY OF VOSS
Vincent Plush & Robyn Holmes
Patrick White and the inception of Voss
Voss is published
Voss the opera premieres
The road to The Voss Journey
The story of Voss begins in 1940 during the Blitz. As the Luftwaffe bombs rain down on London, a 28-year-old Australian is huddling under his bed, sipping Calvados and reading stories about Australian explorers by candlelight.
Map of Australia and New Zealand shewing the routes of
the exploreres [cartographic material] / compiled from the
Government maps. Gordon & Gotch, Melbourne, 1872.
Courtesy of National Library of Australia, nla.map-rm788.Patrick White had been toying with the idea of writing a novel about a “megalomaniac explorer” who had helped map the inner geography of the Australian continent. It wasn’t long before he abandoned his first potential subject, Edward John Eyre, taking a keener look at Ludwig Leichhardt (1813-1848?).
White’s initial view of the German explorer was formed in the anti-Hun hysteria of the day, reflected in Alec Chisholm’s notorious 1941 biography Strange New World. When White returned to Australia after the War, he began to look up old records, his idea seemed to fit the character of Leichhardt. “But as I did not want to limit myself to a historical reconstruction (too difficult and too boring), I only based my explorer on Leichhardt,” he explained to his publisher Ben Heubsch in 1956. “The latter was, besides, merely unusually unpleasant, whereas Voss is mad as well.”
So Ludwig Leichhardt morphed into Johann Ulrich Voss, megalomaniacal, mad, visionary and obsessed with mapping the land that was his to explore “by birthright”.
(Other writers have attempted to portray a fairer portrait of the real Leichhardt, but have failed to supplant the Australian fascination for flawed heroes and abject failure.)
Sidney Nolan, 1957, dust-cover jacket for first edition of
"Voss" by Patrick White, published by Eyre &
Spottiswoode, London. Courtesy of Lady Mary Nolan.When Patrick White’s novel Voss first appeared in 1956, it was greeted with enthusiasm abroad and bemused condescension at home. True, it is not an easy read – only the most persistent reader can get beyond the first 30 or 40 pages; for a while, it was known as “the most famous Australian novel no one has ever finished reading”. But even from the beginning it stood out as an exploration of the soul and psyche of Australia as much as its geography.
Almost from the start, people saw its potential as a film. For decades, Harry M.Miller shopped around for a director. Around 1968, Ken Russell expressed interest and sent an emissary to the Antipodes, John McGrath who wrote a script. Joseph Losey appeared here in 1973 to scout locations, but his attempt to raise government money for the venture failed, so his enterprise remained still-born. At various times, Max von Sydow, Maximillian Schell, Zachary Scott, Keith Michell and even Jack Nicholson have been mentioned as candidates for the title role. The young American director Stuart Cooper took up the cause and film rights to new scripts by David Mercer and remains interested in the subject to this day.
For more than thirty years, Patrick White himself was engaged, either actively or as frustrated onlooker, with various projects to transform the novel into a film or performance art form. With the failure of successive endeavours to launch the film, he had come to feel that Ludwig Leichhardt was taking his revenge on the novelist for daring to use his ill-fated expedition as the basis for the story.
Paradoxically, as prospects for the production of a film faded, another prospect emerged.
Over lunch in Tuscany in 1979, Peter Hemmings, General Manager of The Australian Opera, discussed with novelist David Malouf the prospect of transforming Voss into an opera. Richard Meale would write the music, Malouf the libretto and it would be directed by Jim Sharman. The project would take three years, they thought, targeting the 1982 Adelaide Festival which Sharman was to direct. As it transpired, only 12 minutes of the opera were performed in 1982, the so-called “Garden Scene”. A full production would have to wait another four years and two festivals later.
“David’s libretto was far better than any screenplay of Voss I had read,” Jim Sharman writes in his recent autobiography Blood and Tinsel. “He instinctively understood that the central dilemma in translating the novel into another form was the mysterious communion between Voss, the explorer in the desert, and his muse and spiritual companion in the city, Laura Trevelyan. Opera can dissolve time and space. All that this complex contact required was a vocal harmony and a stroll across the stage and you had it: flesh and flesh together. David’s lyrics inspired the composer, and the translation of Voss to the opera stage was under way.”
Branco Gaica, 1986, baritone Geoffrey Chard as 'Voss'
and soprano Marilyn Richardson as 'Laura Trevelyan' in
"The Garden Scene", Act 1 of the opera "Voss".
Courtesy of Opera Australia.The opera Voss opened at the Adelaide Festival in March 1982, with baritone Geoffrey Chard in the title role and soprano Marilyn Richardson, long-time associate of the composer, singing the role of Laura Trevelyan. It ran for five performances in Adelaide, and then made its way to the Sydney Opera House, then to Melbourne and returning to Sydney in 1990. Stuart Challender conducted a studio recording with the original cast and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, released internationally on ABC-Philips.
Despite the feeling from its creative team, critics and audiences alike that here was an Australian opera that would enter the ongoing repertoire of the national company, that production of Voss was dismantled in 1987. Over two decades later, an entire generation of opera-goers have yet to see for themselves was what one commentator called “the great Australian opera – at last!”.
This story of Voss can be experienced through the extraordinary collections at the nation’s cultural institutions. The three film scripts mentioned earlier have only recently emerged from the collections of the National Film and Sound Archive.
Patrick White, 1984. Brendan Hessington. Courtesy of
National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an7568636At the National Library of Australia, one can see Patrick White’s Voss notebooks, in which he meticulously researched Leichhardt’s expedition. You can share his excitement for the subject matter, viewing Leichhardt’s maps, lectures and letters. You can even hear and see music written for Leichhardt in colonial Sydney, music that is again brought to life by Richard Meale on the operatic stage. You can read the first comments from White’s New York publisher, recommending immediate publication of the book in 1956. You can follow the endless negotiations for the ‘film that never was’ through screenplays and funding proposals and glimpse Patrick’s growing outrage at the failure of the project in a series of his signature tirades. Finally, you can see Patrick, resigned and no longer meddling, handing over complete authority and trust to David Malouf to create the opera’s libretto.
Sir Russell Drysdale,
"Leichardt" (sic), 1980, for
Peter Sculthorpe,
one of six
ink & charcoal sketches
based on characters in
"Essington", the ABC TV
production (1976).
The road to THE VOSS JOURNEY has taken many curious and fascinating side-tracks.
We see at least two other attempts to turn Voss into an opera, by composers Moya Henderson and Barry Conyngham. Richard Meale had created an ending for his Voss
which never made it to the stage production; a final duet between Voss and Laura, it will be heard for the first time during our JOURNEY. The story of Sid Nolan’s pencil sketch for the dust-jacket of the original publication is a saga in its own right. Russell Drysdale penned several sketches of Essington/Leichhardt personages as a gift for his friend Peter Sculthorpe, who has recently found unpublished poems by Patrick White given to him by the author; these new Sculthorpe new settings will be featured on our JOURNEY.
Voss water, "bottled under the
supervision of the Norwegian
Institute of Water Research."
Photograph by Graham Shirley,
NFSA, Sydney. March 2009.To the delight of the JOURNEY’s planning family, there are VOSS-discoveries almost daily. Bottles of “Voss”, an up-market Norwegian spa water, distributed liberally at the post-Oscars parties in Sydney hotels. Confusion with the captain-coach of The Brisbane Lions. And now the emergence in Canberra of a four-piece folk-rock group, Voss, whose biggest achievement has been “discovering and mapping Australia’s inland sea. It is there, and we have sailed it”.
For four days in May 2009, THE VOSS JOURNEY will take us to places of imagination and beauty few have experienced in totality. Our journey has just begun …
VINCENT PLUSH is a composer, writer and broadcaster, currently Head of National Cultural Programmes at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra.
ROBYN HOLMES is a conductor and musicologist, the Curator of Music and Dance at the National Library of Australia in Canberra.
VOSS Home
What's On Home
