Instrumental· 2025

The new dress

for chamber opera

Program note

Mabel is in her room, looking at herself in the mirror and preparing for a social gathering. She brushes her hair, looks at the dress, sees herself wearing it, imagines the judgement of others and immediately feels ridiculous and inadequate. She tries to react with anger, but her emotions turn into sadness, shame and disgust with herself:

We are all flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer.

Loneliness swallows her. Her thoughts blur and panic takes control. In the end, she leaves anyway and repeats the polite phrase everyone expects

I had a wonderful time.

But she knows that she is lying.

More about the piece

The New Dress is a short chamber opera of approximately 35 minutes for mezzo-soprano, two violins, trumpet, piano and drum set, inspired by Virginia Woolf's short story of the same title.

The libretto was adapted by Arianna Pittino from Virginia Woolf's original English short story The New Dress. The text was selected, edited and dramaturgically arranged by the composer for this chamber opera. No modern translation or third-party adaptation has been used.

The work explores shame, self-perception and the violence of the social gaze. Woolf's apparently simple situation - a woman arriving at a social gathering in a new dress - becomes, in this opera, an inner psychological theatre. The protagonist's perception of herself is gradually distorted by imagined judgement, memory, insecurity and social pressure.

The music follows the protagonist's emotional transformations through a sequence of unstable psychological states: melancholy, sadness, repressed anger, loneliness, disgust, panic and exhaustion. The mezzo-soprano embodies the fragility and instability of the inner voice, while the ensemble acts both as an external social environment and as a distorted mirror of her thoughts. Instrumental gestures, sudden dynamic contrasts, fragile textures and theatrical elements are used to make the protagonist's emotional perception audible and visible.

Performed by: Melina Sharbati, mezzo-soprano; Lewin Kreuz and Marta Rando, violins; Ludwig Wanniger, trumpet; Stephanie Chewadi, piano; Benjámin Mohácsi, drum set; Péter Tukora, conductor.

Premiered in Munich, Reaktorhalle, 2 July 2025.