Dame Gillian Whitehead at 80: weaving the threads together

Dame Gillian Whitehead

Photo credit: Gareth Watkins

Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead is 80 years old this week. I’ve interviewed Whitehead a number of times over the past three decades and over that time our friendship and my admiration for her compositions, resilience and wisdom have grown. She is one of our greatest living composers and this quiet and clever woman continues to be a potent force in our composing community.

Writing to mark her birthday I set out to separate different aspects of her career, emphasising the importance of her Māori heritage and her discovery of taonga puoro in an article for the SOUNZ blog here and planning to focus for this story on her many theatre works and associated collaborations.

Whitehead herself showed me that such simplistic separation of her oeuvre is not possible. Compositions for the stage including operas, monodramas and other vocal works with text are a major strand in her work. But in her most recent monodrama, still waiting for its premiere in our pandemic-interrupted times, she has tightly woven the threads of her Māori and pakeha worlds together. As she told me simply, “the two streams are reconciled now”.

I’ll come back to that new work but let’s take Whitehead’s story back a few decades. When I asked her recently about career turning points, she talked about the importance of her short return to New Zealand from the UK in 1978 for the premiere of her first opera Tristan and Iseult at the Auckland Festival. 

“That was really big for me,” she told me. “I’d been out of the country and been back just a couple of times.  It was the biggest success I’d had - and I hadn’t really seen myself as someone who was interested in dramatic writing. It was an affirmation. It paved the way for a whole lot of other stuff.”

The “other stuff” included numerous theatrical collaborations with poet Fleur Adcock.  Whitehead and Adcock have been telling stories in opera together since they discovered a shared interest in medieval history and the legends of the northeast of England while both held artist residencies in the area. The heroic Henry Percy, known as Hotspur, gave his name to their first monodrama although the story was told from the point of view of his wife, Elizabeth. That collaboration embraced artist Gretchen Albrecht, whose magnificent banners became an important part of the production.

Gretchen Albrecht’s banners for Hotspur (1981)

from the collection of the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui

 Since Hotspur in 1980, Whitehead and Adcock have created five more stage works together, including the medieval saga of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the fairytale/fantasy opera The King of the Other Country and more recently Iris Dreaming, about the life of writer Robin Hyde.

Their monodrama Alice for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, written in 2002 as part of Whitehead’s residency with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, is based on Adcock’s poem about her great-aunt’s intrepid journey as a young woman from England to New Zealand and the subsequent tribulations of her life.

All of the collaborations between these two artists explore the pain of travel across distances and the loss and longing of being far from home and loved ones. In each, a solo woman’s voice carries the emotional weight of the narrative. As Adcock told me a few years ago “they’re all women’s stories. I’ve recently written a poem about it for Gillian.”

“…After him [Hotspur] came a parade of heroines,
from medieval queens to my great-aunt Alice,
to sing their way through their difficult lives.
How they haunted us! KM and Iris,
Elizabeth Percy in Alnwick castle,
and Eleanor…”

 [from Ruakaka, 2016]

Poet Fleur Adcock

Photo credit: Jemimah Kuhfeld

Australian journalist, playwright and film critic Anna-Maria dell’Oso was another of Whitehead’s important collaborators while she was based in  Sydney. Together they wrote the operas The Pirate Moon (1986), commissioned by the University of Auckland, and Bride of Fortune (1988) which had its premiere at the Perth Festival. In the latter, the heroine, Grazia, travels from Italy to Australia for an arranged marriage. Yet again the theme of travel between Europe and the other side of the world, the associated displacement and grief and the complex life and relationships of a woman are central to the work. Indeed, the opera itself can be seen as an arranged marriage between the European operatic artform and the issues of contemporary Australia. Unusually for an operatic narrative, it is the man who dies in the end.

Whitehead’s monodrama Out of this Nettle, Danger has a text drawn by Adcock from the writings of another New Zealand ex-patriate, Katherine Mansfield. It includes her words “I’m a writer first and a woman after”. Whitehead agrees that, although in all her stage works until recently there has been a focus on strong, central female characters and most of her collaborators have been woman, she is indeed “a composer first and a woman after”.  She acknowledges the importance of telling women’s stories in music but pushes aside queries about the importance of her gender to her composing, saying, as she said to me first in 1989, “it’s the wrong question.”

“The deeper problem,” she said once, talking about Bride of Fortune, “has perhaps been the mix of Māori and pākeha in me and so I’ve found it difficult to relate to the ‘woman composer’ question. I was brought up outside the Māori traditions but I think I’m drawing on the Māori essence of things as well as the western. It’s something I’ve not talked about because I’m not sure about it. Maybe what I’m doing, the way I’m using canons, rhythms, prime numbers and the “plaiting” of material throughout Bride of Fortune is more to do with Māori weaving traditions than the European way of looking at things?”  

Whitehead’s newest monodrama, written last year, illustrates significant changes in her interests. Written for baritone, it tells the story of a Māori man. The title, Mate Ururoa, is from the whakatauki Kaua e mate wheke mate ururoa! (Don’t die like an octopus, die like a hammerhead shark!).

Whitehead herself wrote the libretto in te reo Māori and English. The true story is of Rotorua-born Roger Ingram Te Kepa Dansey, engineer and Māori All Black, who enlisted when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914 and was one of the five hundred strong “Native Contingent”. His war story is first about the humiliation faced by Māori soldiers, treated as entertainers and diggers of trenches. Later we hear of his heroism, refusing to put his men in danger under orders, being accused of desertion and sent home in disgrace. Back in New Zealand, as stories of Captain Dansey’s valour in battle emerged, he was recruited for the Pioneer Battalion, returned to the war and promoted to the rank of Major.

Whitehead’s libretto is powerful, Dansey challenging his commanding officer:

You show contempt, you trample our mana.

In our tradition, the chief leads his men to fight
Our women beside us.
In your white man's war, your chiefs hide in the rear,
waste a million lives and take the glory.

Whitehead wrote Mate Ururoa for US-based Māori baritone David Tahere, who has four performances scheduled in the States, the first at Carnegie Hall on November 11, Armistice Day. As well as haka and waiata the work includes taonga puoro, to be played by New Zealand-based Ariana Tikao, so the performances are dependent on vaccination schedules in New Zealand and the US. New Zealand performances are also planned although production funding is not yet confirmed.

Baritone David Tahere

Since returning to New Zealand about two decades ago,  Whitehead has travelled a long way on what she calls her “journey” with taonga puoro and Māori culture. Mate Ururoa illustrates what she refers to as the “profound changes” in her musical language that have resulted and the reconciliation of the two sides of her musical and cultural heritage. While celebrating this remarkable composer on her special birthday, let’s also look forward to experiencing this important new work soon.  

To mark Dame Gillian Whitehead’s 80th birthday, RNZ Concert broadcast a special programme of her music on April 23, 2021. They also released this invaluable Playlist of her works recorded over the past five decades.