Mayo-based composer wins world’s largest award for new opera

COMPOSER Michael Gallen has won the 2025 FEDORA Opera Prize, for his work The Curing Line. The prize of €100,000 is the world’s largest award for opera.

Speaking to The Mayo News, Gallen, says it is “an affirmation’ to win the award as the work involved in creating an opera ‘can be very solitary and takes a lot of time to develop’ so this award ‘gives this impetus to get back into the work and believe you’re on the right track.’

The Louisburgh-based composer has been enjoying sharing the news at home and the lots of mini celebrations as friends and family find out.

Gallen’s route into opera hasn’t been a traditional one, he began playing traditional music, before starting to write music after he started joining bands.

One of the challenges for him is to “connect the world of opera that is true to where I come from and a lot of that has come from connecting opera to Irish story telling and sean-nós.”

The Monaghan native says that, “as an Irish person, this is an opera that draws its power from the margins. We didn’t have the grand opera houses. What we had in Irish culture was the finely honed art of telling a story or singing a song and opening up a portal into another world for a small gathering of people in the kitchen. For me, that’s the route from where I want to draw.”

Ceremony

THAT the award ceremony took place at the Vienna State Opera and decided by a judging panel made up of the heads of some of the largest opera houses and festivals in the world, is a real indication of how highly Gallen’s work is recognised on an international scale.

An award like this is important, says Gallen, as it “shows a new interpretation of opera is rewarded and that it connects with people. Our own decolonised version of Opera is what the world of opera needs.” Where’s there’s space, there’s space to find ideas

Both the Fedora-winning opera, The Curing Line, and the 2021 Fedora-nominated opera, Elsewhere, were composed in Gallen’s home office in Louisburgh. Having the creative space that living in Mayo has afforded him and his wife, Mary-Lou, is hugely important for both his work and her work as a writer.

Familiar with the area from visiting his Westport-based sister, Mags, the couple moved to Mayo in September 2020 and fell in love with the place.

One of his favourite walks is over Kilgeever Hill as getting the body moving is fundamental to his composing process. It helps to unravel any knots that happen in the music. A key part of creating an opera is “managing the ebbs and flows of the energy of a piece and to get a sense of the flow, it helps to be outside and move your body.”

Inspiration

WALKING over the back-end of Old Head and over the headland to Louisburgh is particularly satisfying as “it’s high, on a precipice and there’s only the sky above you, you have this feeling of space. It’s as if the music exists in this space, like a river that flows above your head. On walks like that, when you emerge from a path and there’s just the sky - that’s where ideas flow. Where’s there’s space, there’s space to find ideas.”

Although The Curing Line is set in the border region, Gallen says that the themes within the opera of small community interconnectivity and people being able to heal one another alongside a deeper connection to older ways of living resonate in a Mayo context.