MEDIATHEK

Airline Icarus is about the intersecting thoughts of passengers aboard a commercial airplane. It explores themes of hubris mixed with technology, the forced intimacy of strangers and flying too close to the sun. Over the course of the work, the plane becomes brighter and eventually vanishes.

In 2001 when visiting with the playwright Anton Piatigorsky, I told him I was looking for ideas about an opera that takes place on an airplane. Anton told me that he had just written a poem about the absurd little society we often take for granted aboard commercial flights and the unsettling mixture of hubris and technology: we’ll make small talk and watch movies while inches outside the window is a glorious cloudscape or freezing certain-death.

He later proposed the perfect metaphor for what we were trying to do: Icarus. Icarus , you’ll remember, flew too close to the sun and his wax wings melted and he fell to the earth in a blaze of light. His father, Deadalus, looked for him, crying: “Icarus, where are you!” and “Damn this art!”

To me, one of the most interesting parts of the myth is that Icarus disappears in much of the same way that people involved in airline tragedies disappear, and the way the astronauts of the Space Shuttle Columbia disappeared in a blaze of light over Texas.

Deadalus’s cries of “Damn this art” are heartbreaking, not so much because Icarus has crashed and died, but more that he knows that we are doomed to keep building things airplanes, computers, operas - in an endless cycle of trial and error that sometimes leads to disastrous consequences.

Like Deadalus, we might curse this sorry state, as does the terrified Scholar, or we can rejoice in the thrill of our power to create wonderful things, as sings the Pilot in his aria – No peace so great. No joy so pure - as soaring Icarus must have thought before the moment he disappeared.

In 2011, Airline Icarus was awarded the Italian Premio Fedora Award by an international jury chaired by Louis Andriessen. The 2014 Maniac Star/Soundstreams production of Airline Icarus in Toronto was recently nominated for 5 Dora Mavor Moore awards: Outstanding Production, Outstanding New Musical/Opera, Outstanding Scenic Design, Outstanding Musical Direction and Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble. The NAXOS recording of Airline Icarus was awarded the 2015 Juno Award for Classical Composition of the Year.