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Clip description
This is an excerpt from the garden scene in Act One of Voss. Nighttime in the garden of the Sydney home of the rich merchant Mr Bonner, who will help finance Voss’s expedition to cross the country. Two of his dinner guests, Johann Ulrich Voss (Geoffrey Chard), the surly German explorer, and Bonner’s young niece Laura Trevelyan (Marilyn Richardson), wander out to catch the night air. They find much in common in their imagination and dreams: 'I will be followed across the continent by your thoughts’, Voss declares. Laura crosses into those thoughts: 'I crossed the threshold. He was there.’
Curator’s notes
Against a shimmering orchestral sound – had Debussy ever visited the Australian outback he may have written music such as this! – we eavesdrop on the first encounter between two cultures, the world of the German Romantic lied floating alongside a culture still unformed and equivocal. The interior passion of this unlikely couple remains sublimated, but the soaring music reveals an intensity that will sustain them over years, distance and fates. In the full 12 minutes of this 'Garden Scene’, Richard Meale has written an Australian liebe gesang that looks both forward and backwards, in and out.
