Four women travel 140m miles across the heavens – only to find their new world in hostile corporate hands. Composer Jennifer Walshe reveals what fed into her epic opera, from low-gravity procreation to Shrek in space
W
hy write an opera about Mars? Because Mars isn’t just a planet. It’s a philosophy, an ideology. The way humans think about it changes over time, reflecting the unstable mix of assumptions, hopes, dreams and anxieties that define each historical moment.
In 1965, Nasa’s Mariner 4 probe flew past Mars and beamed the first closeup images of the red planet (or of any other planet) back to Earth. Prior to that flight, humans knew the planet only through telescopes, and it was thought that its surface would feature vegetation and that life may have evolved there. Mariner 4 revealed the truth: it was a rocky, cratered place seemingly devoid of life. President Lyndon B Johnson declared that “it may just be that life as we know it, with its humanity, is more unique than many have thought, and we must remember this”. The New York Times went further: “Mars, it now appears, is a desolate world.”
If like me you were not then born, try to imagine what it would have been like to be alive in that summer of 1965. In June, Ed White became the first US astronaut to perform a spacewalk. (The Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov had preceded him by just under three months.) White’s experience of the spacewalk was so deeply transcendent that he described re-entering the capsule as “the saddest moment of my life”. Life magazine devoted an issue to White’s “Glorious Walk in the Cosmos”: millions pored over the images. Only a few weeks later, Mariner 4’s images of Mars were broadcast on TV, showing its desolation. We started a summer floating in White’s cosmic bliss, believing that we might not be alone in the universe, only to end it with those hopes quashed.
