Welsh National Opera’s new opera, Migrations, returns to Cardiff in October before going on tour across the country. We spoke to director and co-librettist Sir David Pountney about the history and stories that inspired the opera, and how the opera came to be.
Originally planned to commemorate the 400th anniversary of sailing of the Mayflower in 2020, Migrations grew and evolved beyond its original idea. Pountney’s vision was to explore six different stories centred on the theme of migration, told in such a way that they interwove and paralleled each other.
When the opera opens, we see travellers on Mayflower, undertaking an idealistic migration to the ‘New World’ to flee religious persecution. This journey would however set in motion the course of events that would eventually lead to the displacement of First Nation Communities and the environmental exploitation and destruction of their ancestral homes. We are next introduced to Dawn, a member of the First Nation community who is protesting the exploitation of natural resources in Canada in the modern day. This strand of the story, entitled Treaty 6, was written by Sarah Woods, and you can read more about the storyhere.
Sir David PountneyIt kind of parallels the Mayflower story, so you're seeing the cause and effect
Written by Edson Burton and Miles Chambers, Flight, Death or Fog interweaves through both acts of the opera. Following the story of Pero Jones, an 18th century slave in Bristol. Pero’s story represents ‘a case of involuntary immigration’, and Pountney remarks how Migrations was addressing an ‘amazingly topical issue since they decided to throw Mr. Colston’s statue into the dock’. You can read more about Flight, Death or Foghere.
Sir David PountneyThis story reaches very, very far into the roots of our own national heritage and culture and is something that we all have to deal with
Whether it be the exploitation of indigenous land, reckoning with the role that Great Britain played in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or confronting our current role in the disruption to ecosystems and environmental damage that global warming is causing, Pountney keenly points out that ‘there are positive things as well as negative, and it’s important to bear that in mind in all of these stories’.
You can experience Migrations on tour this Autumn, between 2 October and 26 November in Cardiff, Llandudno, Birmingham, Southampton, and Plymouth.