From New France to a "Millennial Mall":
Identity Paradigms in Istvan Anhalt's Operas

By Gordon E. Smith

On the way I am
I was before
and before then
I shall be and
shall be again
From there I came
here I am now
for a while
and then a little longer perhaps

Istvan Anhalt, Thisness (1988)

I do not accept that anyone is permanently fixed by his or her “identity”; but neither can one shed specific structures of race and culture, class and caste, gender and sexuality, environment and history. I understand these, and other cross-cutting determinations, not as homelands, chosen or forced, but as sites of world travel: difficult encounters and occasions for dialogue.

James Clifford, Routes

The Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt (b. 1919) composed four operas over a thirty-year period: La Tourangelle (1970–75), Winthrop (1977–86), Traces (Tikkun) (1994–95), and Millennial Mall (Lady Diotima’s Walk) (1999–2000). These works are not operas in the traditional sense of the genre, with music, staging, drama, and plot, but, as Anhalt suggests, are “mind operas” that do not depend principally on conventional operatic devices.