(Credit: © Priska Ketterer)

Austrian composer and multimedia artist Olga Neuwirth was awarded the 2022 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, which includes a $100,000 cash prize.

Neuwirth was honored for the composition of the opera “Orlando” which had its world premiere at the Wiener Staatsoper in December 2019. Neuwirth also wrote the libretto in collaboration with Catherine Filloux; the work was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same title.

“I wanted to reflect the wonderful diversity of life and evoke a subtle form of sexual attraction that cannot be pigeonholed into a single gender,” Neuwirth said in a press statement provided by the University of Louisville. “What’s more, the main character refuses to be patronized and treated in a condescending manner, something that continually happens to women with no end in sight.”

“‘Orlando’ is an enormous, supremely ambitious work,” Marc Satterwhite, who directs the Grawemeyer music award, said in the same statement. “The libretto and multifaceted score challenge our preconceptions of gender and sexual roles and test our ideas of what opera is and is not. It also seems appropriate that the first female-composed opera to be performed at the Vienna State Opera, a venue long regarded as a bastion of tradition, should take aim at these issues.”

Former winners of the prestigious University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award include such names as Pierre Boulez, John Adams, Thomas Adès, Andrew Norman, Joan Tower, Kaija Saariaho and Unsuk Chin.