Wilde is an opera in three acts for six singers, silent actor and symphony orchestra, with a libretto by the Austrian dramatist Händl Klaus. Calixto Bieito is the stage director of this Schwetzingen SWR Festspiele and Staatstheater Mainz coproduction. Schwetzingen (Baden-Württemberg) is a city of some 20,000 inhabitants in the Rhine Valley south of Frankfurt and north of Stuttgart, not far from Heidelberg. Since 1952 this classical music festival has been held here and in 2015 it will be number 64, from 25 April to 30 May. One of the main features of the festival is the world premiere of a new opera, as is the case with Wilde.
The composer and pianist Hèctor Parra (Barcelona, 1976) has been living in Paris since 2002 and has taught at the Ircam since 2013. He studied music at the Barcelona Conservatory (composition with Carles Guinovart and David Padrós and piano with M. Jesús Crespo), in Geneva with Michael Jarrell and at the Ircam with Jonathan Harvey and Brian Ferneyhough. Parra does his creative work in interaction with the visual arts, theoretical physics or evolutionary biology. His opera Hypermusic Prologue (2009) had a libretto by Lisa Randall, an outstanding theoretical physicist at Harvard University and stage design by the English artist Matthew Ritchie.
In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Composition prize (Munich) and in 2007 the Donald Aird Memorial prize from San Francisco and the Impuls prize from Graz. In 2005 he was unanimously awarded the Ircam “Tremplin” and in 2002 the INAEM Musical Composition prize. He has received commissions from the French Government, the Centre Pompidou, the Berlin Akademie der Künste, the City of Munich and the Munchener Biennale, the Catalan Government Ministry of Culture and the OBC, among other institutions. Leading orchestras such as the Tokyo Philharmonic, the Holland Symfonia, the Ensemble InterContemporain, the Brussels Philharmonic and the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya have performed his works at many of the main international festivals and concert halls, such as Lucerne, Avignon, Cité de la Musique de Paris, Vienna Konzerthaus, Auditori de Barcelona, Wien Modern, Donaueschingen, Philharmonie Luxemburg, Amsterdam Muziekgebouw, Gran Teatre del Liceu, Steirischer Herbst de Graz, Stuttgart Opera House, Festival Internacional de Granada, Tokyo Suntory Hall and the Guggenheim in New York.
Hèctor Parra recently gave the first performance of another of his compositions in Germany. That was on 8 May in Köln with the work Catalonia Lliure, which will be performed again on 13 June in Stuttgart.
