With Richard Meale’s ‘Great Australian Opera’, Voss, finally about to be revived by State Opera South Australia and Victorian Opera, composer Ian Whitney recalls his first encounter with the famous work, and with Meale himself.

Ian Whitney, Australian Content, Australian Music

Ian Whitney. Image supplied.

I first became interested in opera, and particularly contemporary opera, as a first-year undergraduate at the Queensland Conservatorium when I stumbled upon a late-night broadcast of Nixon in China. From there I had the obligatory excursion into Britten and Tippett, but, in 2001, I also had the extremely good luck to be in the right place for two new Australian operas within the space of a month. The first was Stephen Leek’s Seeking True South, a beautiful chamber work about migration that has been criminally neglected since. The second was Andrew Schultz’s Going into Shadows, a large-scale opera that had airport terrorism as a central plot device and the very unfortunate coincidence of being scheduled for the same week as September 11, 2001.

My interest in contemporary opera grew. I wrote two during my undergraduate degree, one of which was the talk of the town, mainly...