January 2, 2007—Lost Highway, a dramatic music theater work by noted Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, will receive its U.S. premiere in February 2007 by the Contemporary Music Division of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music as a co-production with Miller Theatre at Columbia University.

Neuwirth collaborated with Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature, on the libretto for Lost Highway. Its genesis, however, is the film by David Lynch and Barry Gifford, released in 1997 by October Films. Neuwirth’s Lost Highway received its world premiere in Graz, Austria, on October 31, 2003, during the Steirischer Herbst Festival of New Music in co-production with the year-long festival Graz 2003: Cultural Capital of Europe and Theater Basel. About that production, Larry L. Lash wrote in the Financial Times: “Lost Highway entertains, challenges our perceptions of opera, and demands to be experienced.” For his New York Times review of the opera Lost Highway, Robert Hilferty wrote: “The resulting score is enigmatic and labyrinthine, constantly morphing from one thing to the next. Ms. Neuwirth … knows how to bend and twist sound like no other.”

The U.S. premiere of Lost Highway will be staged in Oberlin Thursday through Saturday, February 8 through 10, 2007, at 8 p.m. in Finney Chapel on the Oberlin College campus. The work, which is performed in English, then travels to New York City for two performances at Miller Theatre on Friday, February 23, and Saturday, February 24, at 8 p.m. These productions contain adult content and themes, and are not recommended for young audiences.

Tickets for the Oberlin production of Lost Highway are $5 for the general public and $3 for students. Call Oberlin’s Central Ticket Service, located in the lobby of Hall Auditorium, at 440-775-8169 or 1-800-371-0178. Seating is general admission. Finney Chapel is wheelchair accessible and is located on the southwest corner of Lorain St. (Route 511) and N. Professor St., across from Tappan Square. Complete information about the Oberlin production is available at www.oberlin.edu/con.

Reserved-seat tickets for the Miller Theatre production are $35 and can be purchased by calling Miller Theatre’s box office at 212-854-7799 or online at www.millertheatre.com. Miller Theatre is wheelchair accessible and is located on the campus of Columbia University on Broadway at 116th Street, New York, New York.

A decade after Lynch’s Lost Highway first intrigued audiences world wide, the controversial film has been transformed from a tense, terse screenplay into a composition seething with sound.  The forthcoming U.S. premiere is a unique collaborative production of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music’s Division of Contemporary Music, featuring performances by the acclaimed Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, original video footage by the Oberlin production crew, live electronics, and a cast drawn from the Oberlin College student body.

Lost Highway centers on Fred Madison, an ardent jazz musician deeply troubled by the closed world of his beautiful but glacial wife, Renee. Tormented by eerie, anonymous videotapes and nightmarish encounters with a macabre Mystery Man, Fred’s sanity finally breaks upon his suspicion of an extramarital affair, and he murders Renee. The shock of the event triggers an extravagant psychological shift.

Lynch has said that the story is “about a man in trouble,” the trouble being the rare mental disorder psychogenic fugue. Neuwirth has commented on the film’s musical, fugue-like structure, which entwines one “in a time loop,” and in her program notes for the opera she writes: “To avoid lapsing into mere representation on stage … it was clear from the start that I had to conceive music and video (the two forms of art which deal with time) simultaneously so that I would be able to match the famous film with a new arrangement of sound and image.”

Strickland Gardner Professor of Music Timothy Weiss will conduct the award-winning Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, with stage direction and sound design provided respectively by Jonathon Field, Associate Professor of Opera Theater and Director of Oberlin Opera Theater, and Tom Lopez, Associate Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts and chair of the TIMARA (Technology in Music and Related Arts) program. The producer of Lost Highway is Professor of Composition Lewis Nielson, Chair of Oberlin’s Composition Department and Director of its Division of Contemporary Music.

Composer Olga Neuwirth is gaining acclaim for her unconventional musical style, which deconstructs language and other everyday sounds in order to find new, musical contexts for familiar acoustical elements. Neuwirth has been an artist-in-residence at the Berliner Künstlerprogramm and composer-in residence with the Koninklijk Philharmonic Orchestra and at the Luzerner Festwochen. Her first opera, Bählamms Fest, was performed during the Wiener Festwochen in 1999, receiving the Ernst Krenek-Preis. The following year her composition Clinamen/Nodus, written for Pierre Boulez and the London Symphony Orchestra, premiered in London, followed by a world tour.

A trailblazer of the avant-garde, Neuwirth has said in reference to her compositional style, “How can you draw people in, making it impossible for them to escape from listening? It’s so hard in our times to listen.  But I never want to make music very clear.  It must always be a riddle.  There is never a theme you can easily latch onto.”

Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, co-librettist for Lost Highway, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. She made her literary debut with the collection Lisas Schatten (Lisa’s Shadow) in 1967. Alongside her literary writing she has made a reputation as a dauntless polemicist with a web site always poised to comment on burning issues. Her other literary prizes and awards include the Bremer Literature Prize, the Berlin Theatre Prize, the City of Düsseldorf Heinrich Heine Prize, the Lessing Critics’ Prize, the Stig Dagerman Prize and the Franz-Kafka Literature Prize.