Here’s where Sydney Chamber Opera comes into the picture. Year after year, this small but heroic company puts new operas on the stage, thereby propounding ideas that actually address the fundamental question: what is the opera of tomorrow? And, because its productions are leaner in scale than a traditional grand opera, ticket prices are affordable, making opera accessible to those who don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for an evening at the theatre. Of course, there are different definitions of “accessibility.” SCO makes no bones about dwelling at the pointy end of artistic endeavour—but that’s what makes it special. It is unflinching in its commitment not to entertainment, but to beauty. 

One thing we can be certain of is that opera won’t die. Invented more than four hundred years ago, the art form has survived whole epochs; not even the societal and aesthetic convulsions of the twentieth century could knock it over. Not that it hasn’t evolved over the centuries: a Handel opera with its da capo arias is nothing like the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner, let alone one of Kaija Saariaho’s recent masterpieces. It’s not one style or the other, it’s the idea of opera that’s durable. 

Let’s think about the art form’s beginnings in the Italy of the late Renaissance. As part of the humanist preoccupation with bringing Greek antiquity closer to the centre of intellectual life, opera’s originators set out to revive antique drama and perform it the way they believed it was originally intended: with music. Indeed, much of ancient Greek poetry was sung and performed either by wandering bards or to the accompaniment of a lyre, hence the term “lyric poetry.” The kernel of opera—that citizens come together in a place where, like gods, they can watch on as mortals expose their best and worst instincts and act out their—our—most passionate behaviours in a performance involving language, music and all the expressive possibilities of the human body—goes back thousands of years. Coming as it does from the roots of Western culture, it is an idea that will always be relevant.

We don’t know what ancient Greek music sounded like. That’s why the early opera composers couched these timeless stories, of Orpheus, of Odysseus, of Medea, in the music of their time. And this is exactly what we are doing in Gilgamesh. No, it’s not Greek. The originators of opera also turned their quills to Biblical, Roman and other historical subjects, much like the painters and other artists of the same era. Given that the Epic of Gilgamesh is an antecedent to the epics of Homer, had they known about it—the clay tablets on which it is engraved were lost until the nineteenth century—they might well have composed a Gilgamesh opera themselves.

Like those Renaissance pioneers, we, in making Gilgamesh, are collectively scouring what remains of the cradle of civilisation in search of clues as to what is truly universal. We ask: who are we? What does it mean to be human? We commune with those who have come before us. We listen. We learn. We swap notes. We certainly don’t always agree: thank heavens we don’t live in a society where, for example, women are literally the property of men, as was mostly the case in ancient Mesopotamia. The Assyrians also thought the sun was a god, and didn’t know where it went at night. But, for every feature of Gilgamesh’s world that isn’t recognisable to us, there’s something that is. There’s brutal questing for power, reflection on humanity’s relationship with nature, an obsession with the twin mysteries of sex and death. Moreover, the characters are driven by primary emotions like ambition, jealousy, vengeance, fear, grief and, of course, desire—is that not the stuff of opera? Is that not the stuff of human life?

It’s important to understand that we are not archeologists attempting to decode the beliefs and ways of an extinct people. We read what’s written on those clay tablets with contemporary eyes. Certain elements jump out at us that might not have for past generations, like Gilgamesh’s apparent homosexuality, while other aspects that have previously been dwelt upon, such as Gilgamesh’s spiritual struggle with mortality, recede somewhat into the background. What we’ve done is subjective. It’s a take, not a study.

We are also artists, not museum curators. We tell Gilgamesh’s story in our own words—that is to say, with utterly contemporary musical and theatrical language which makes the most of what Sydney Chamber Opera’s virtuoso performers have to offer (with some cutting-edge electronics thrown in), all refracted through the prism of contemporary queerness. Despite being based on the oldest written story in existence, Gilgamesh is absolutely a work of our times in that sense. But don’t worry, folks. It’s still very much a capital-O opera, with frocks, a triumphal march, a diva that makes a stunning entrance, a love duet, a tragic death scene and—believe it or not—a couple of tunes.