POETRY
Sequences of Poems
Melanie began writing and publishing poems in her twenties. She has published two volumes to date and won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry in 2005. Her first collection was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
SEQUENCES OF POEMS
The Tender Map
“Challenger’s collection is… an allegorical geography in which each poem is titled after a place, but each place carries with it a secondary title naming some emotional concept with which it is associated… the book invites us to read in both ways simultaneously, so that the physical is invested with the emotional and vice versa, and one can only make sense of one through the other. It is this difficulty in looking simultaneously in two distinct ways, together with the ravishing intensity of Challenger’s language which makes this book so intriguing.”
— Toby Martinez de las Rivas, PN Review
A short sequence of poems mapping places and emotions from Antarctica to North Yorkshire to the Highlands of Scotland. The poems were written between 2008-2010, with a final poem commissioned in 2015 for the walls of the new Highland Hospice in Inverness. Illustrated by Rose Ferraby, it was a limited edition print run by Guillemot Books.
SEQUENCES OF POEMS
Galatea
“Sublime, precise, darkly foreboding, perpetually risking loss. Galatea, more long poem than sequence, persuades through its high art which sustains the reader, even as she suffers the pain of all “our arrested affections.”’
— Harold Bloom
The name Galatea refers to the female figure in Greek myth sculpted from stone by the hands of Pygmalion. Obsessed by the statue, Pygmalion asks the gods to turn her to flesh. The poems draw themes from this central story. Galatea was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2005.
POETRY FOR MUSIC
Collaboration with Mark Simpson
Melanie began collaborating with composer Mark Simpson, after he wrote a short tone-poem in response to her first poetry collection, Galatea. The piece, Mirror Fragment, was performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in 2008. Together, they were Jerwood Opera writing fellows in 2013. Their first collaboration was a commission for the Manchester International Festival in 2005. Their first opera together was Pleasure, co-commissioned by Royal Opera, Aldeburgh Music, and Opera North, which premiered in 2016.
ORATORIO
The Immortal
“A blazingly original oratorio.”
— THE GUARDIAN
“… the most thrilling new choral work I have heard for years. With this, he and his librettist, the poet Melanie Challenger, match the grandeur of those epic avant-garde choral pieces produced half a century ago by the likes of Penderecki, Stockhausen and the young Tavener.”
— THE TIMES
The Immortal is an oratorio commissioned by Manchester International Festival and premiered by BBC Philharmonic in 2015. It is based on the life of Frederic Myers, a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research, and a series of extraordinary seances that took place in the early part of the twentieth century. The crisis experienced by those of Myers’ generation was not just that of faith or of moral authority, but of the meaning and value of human love inside a scientifically revealed universe that rendered it futile. The Immortal was performed at the 2017 BBC Proms under Juanjo Mena and received the 2016 South Bank Sky Arts Award for classical music.
OPERA
Pleasure
“…it turns out to be the perfect operatic subject: squalid and earthbound yet imbued with a radiant, almost mythic quality……At the start of what one hopes will be long operatic career, Simpson has pulled off a genuine coup: a glimpse of the numinal within sight of the urinal.”
— THE GUARDIAN
Pleasure is set in a hedonistic gay club in the north of England, and is a reworking of the Hephaestus myth. For years, the cleaner Val has been a shoulder to cry on and a confidante. She is much-loved but viewed as an enigma. Why is she still there? Why does she never leave? When a young man, both beautiful and unpredictable, arrives from the city and leaves a gift for Val, it marks the beginning of a passionate and violent night…Starring Lesley Garret in a production directed by Tim Albery, it toured in 2016.
POETRY FOR MUSIC
Music for Remembrance
In response to research and collaborations on the history of twentieth-century conflict, Melanie worked with composers James Whitbourn and Tarik O’Regan on two choral works commemorate the lives of young people caught up in wars. The first, Annelies, was the only official adaptation of the diaries of Anne Frank. The piece, and oratorio called Annelies, was produced in association with the Jewish Music Institute for the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust, and continues to be performed around the world. The second work is a choral piece by Tarik O’Regan for adult and youth choirs, adapting some of the diaries from Melanie and Zlata Filipovic’s book, Stolen Voices. It was produced in association with Imperial War Museum, London.
ORATORIO
Annelies
“Melanie Challenger has fashioned an elegiac libretto from the poetic pages [of the Diary of Anne Frank] which James Whitbourn sets with such tender respect it’s almost impossible to hear without tears.”
— THE GUARDIAN
“The sound of church bells, the drone of aircraft, and finally the stifling silence of the camps add discreet detail to a score whose respectful understatement is its greatest strength.”
— THE TIMES
Annelies is an adaptation of the diary of Anne Frank into a large-scale choral work, whose original purpose was to provide memorial music for commemoration of the Holocaust and to support education work on tolerance with young people. It brings to life the diary written by Annelies Marie Frank between 1942 and 1944 when she and her family hid in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse. Annelies was commissioned in association with Jewish Music Institute and Millennium Commission for 60th anniversary of Holocaust in 2005. Excerpts were first heard in Westminster Palace, London as part of the official Holocaust Memorial Day, televised by the BBC. The full work premiered in 2005 by Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin.
The world premiere of Annelies was given on April 5, 2005 at the Cadogan Hall, London. Leonard Slatkin conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Choir of Clare College Cambridge and Louise Kateck. The US premiere was given on April 28, 2007 in Westminster Choir College, Princeton. James Jordan conducted the Westminster Williamson Voices with Lynn Eustis. The world premiere of the completed chamber version was given on June 12, 2009, in the German Church, The Hague, with Daniel Hope leading the ensemble, and soprano Adrianna Zukerman. It was recorded in 2012 and released on the Naxos label.
The recording was nominated for a 2013 Grammy Award.