Claudia Molitor: A Good Memory

Within the extensive programme of Sonica, Claudia Molitor stands out not only due to her background a composer - alongside a cohort of visual artists and musicians coming from an electronic tradition - but because the scale of her Remember Me is more modest than spectacular. "In a time when 'big', 'more', 'hi-...' are often considered better and more exciting," she says. "There is, for me, a desire to counterbalance this and focus on the smaller, the neglected, the less audible and visible." While she draws on the stories of opera - imagining a friendship between the classical tragic victims Dido and Eurydice - she has pinned her multi-media opera inside a desk, at Scotland Street School Museum.

"This piece tries to draw the listener-spectator into a sonic space where small sounds become big events, where the senses are heightened to hear what we might usually miss," Molitor continues. "I am fascinated with the way that we can occupy ourselves in a world with trials and tribulations and great big events and ideas (like in an opera) with only a pencil and paper, a made up song or a few toys when we are children." Taking her cue from this, Molitor condensed the grand themes into a tiny space. " So miniaturist on the surface yes, but still with all the big ideas and ideals!"

Remember Me also stands out in the festival programme as one of two pieces - the other is Bluebeard - that explicitly connects to opera, the original "total art" that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, was seen as an integrative performance to include all of the other arts. There's a a clear line from that vision of opera to Cathie Boyd's vision for Sonica, although whereas last time, it ended up with Wagner, the scope of Cryptic's festival offers more intimate works with equally lofty ambitions.

Molitor expands. "Themes in opera are of course grand and big and tragic, they seem hyper-real, but then those themes touch all our lives, because essentially opera is always a reflection of the way society understands itself at any given time, in any given socio-political or cultural situation. It reflects on the way people relate to and interact with each other. Of course on the opera stage this is highly stylised, but then it is in my work too, but in a very different way." 

Yet the scale of Remember Me, and even the original inspiration - the gift of an antique from Molitor's grandmother - insist that this is a far more personal performance than a grand-standing comment on these socio-political situations. Her heroines may have been victims in their stories, but art has given them a grandeur and sympathy. "They are very different, but what they both have in common is that they are defined by very specific roles in their respective stories," she comments,

"In terms of music and opera I see a connection when looking at two arias: Dido's Lament in Purcell's opera is one of the most well known operatic arias where Dido laments her absent lover Aeneas, who is travelling the seas; Orpheus' lament for Eurydice, lost to him to the Underworld after she has been bitten by a snake, in Gluck's opera is a similarly celebrated aria," she adds. "These two laments to me highlight how the female voice in opera and, in turn, in society exists in relation to the male, rarely on its own terms. This is an important aspect of opera, where the most fantastical arias are often sung by the female voice, but that female element is more often than not the aspect that has unsettled the status quo, which by the end of the opera is re-established often by the death of the heroine." 

Like many a student reading The Aeneid at sixteen, realising how unfairly Dido is being treated both by the author Virgil and her lover Aeneas, Molitor hopes to save Dido. Unlike the student, however, she has not approached this by becoming a Latin teacher before realising his vocation was in criticism. "In a way, that's what Remember Me proposes, a construction of a space where this female voice can enter on her own terms... an alternative “ending” for Dido and Eurydice." 

Remember Me more than embodies Sonica's tagline of "sonic art for the visually minded": it speaks to wider concerns about both how performance is consumed, deliberately avoiding the fashion for the monumental - perhaps often visible in the work of Scottish theatre companies - while seriously considering the way that art can both reveal historical perspectives, in this case about women, and then address them and look towards change.  

Scotland Street School, 8, 14, 15 November. Various times