Claudia Osborne

Claudia Osborne is a writer and director working across stage and screen. She was the inaugural director within Opera Australia’s Young Artist Program from 2025 to 2026, and is a graduate of the NIDA Directing course. Most recently, she was named the recipient of the Opera Foundation for Young Australians’ Berlin Opera Music Award, offering her a contract with the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. Her directing credits at NIDA include Spring Awakening (2024) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (2022). Her short film, Rash, which she wrote and directed premiered at the Festival des Antipodes, went on to win the AFTRS Award for Best Screenplay in an Australian Short Film, and was Highly Commended for Outstanding Emerging Female Director at Flickerfest International Short Film Festival. In February, she will direct a double bill of Poulenc’s La voix humaine and Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges for Opera Australia.

A naughty, violent child finally gets his comeuppance when his furniture and the many animals and insects he’s injured come to life and demand penance. But why does this bratty kid insist on hurting everyone around him? Why is he like this? 101 years after this opera first premiered, in a world where not only the rights of children but the concept of childhood itself has radically shifted, it is impossible not to ask.

It took composer Maurice Ravel and librettist Colette more than a decade to complete L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. Approached in 1914 by Jacques Rouché, the head of the Paris Opéra, to write the story for a new ballet, Colette completed the first outline in just eight days. When Rouché approached Ravel as the desired composer, Colette’s story captivated him so completely that he insisted the work be fully realised as an opera.

Despite this, it would be four years before Ravel saw Colette’s completed libretto. In 1915, after numerous attempts to enter the air force, Ravel finally joined his brother in the supply corps where he worked as an ammunition driver on the home front. Meanwhile, Colette, now working as a journalist for one of France’s largest newspapers, Le Matin, accompanied her enlisted husband to Verdun. Her 1915 headline reads ‘CHILDREN AMONG THE RUINS’:

“The frozen earth sleeps, half-abandoned, and endures whatever shelters in its folds: hastily dug in one spot, a machine gun beneath its screen of branches; there, a dead man beneath his cross… another dead man, another cross, topped with a képi [cap]…”

It’s difficult to comprehend how the backdrop of war, and the horrors that both Colette and Ravel witnessed in those years might have affected their lives, let alone this work. It was here, in the shadow of war, that we began to gain some insight into what might have made our little boy so upset.

A little boy’s father went to war and never returned. Three years go by. It is 1919. His mother and sister no longer speak of the father, but the little boy refuses to give up hope. Angry and alone, the boy takes his rage out on his mother and sister, and when they’re not around, the furniture, the animals, the bugs and the trees. But, in his dreams, the boy must stand trial for the harm he has done. Emotions he cannot express play out on a battlefield, where dragonfly widows, sister squirrels and orphaned frogs force him to confront his shame and grief, and, eventually, the possibility that other perspectives might exist beyond his own.

– Claudia Osborne

Stephen Mould

Sydney-born Stephen Mould studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, London. During the 1990’s he worked extensively in opera houses and festivals in Europe and Germany, including Opera Frankfurt (1993-6). In 1996 he joined the staff of Opera Australia, where he regularly appeared as a conductor and was appointed Head of Music in 2004. Dr Mould has conducted throughout Australia, as well as in New Zealand and Asia. He is currently Associate Professor in Operatic Studies, Repetiteurship and Conducting at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney. Curating Opera, based upon his Doctoral thesis, was published by Routledge, UK (2021).  His most recent publication is Carlo Felice Cillario, Italian maestro of the Australian Opera (Connor Court, 2024). Dr Mould is currently the recipient of an ARC DECRA award, researching the vibrancy of the Australian opera ecosystem. 

Simon Lobelson

With a distinguished career that has spanned 4 continents and almost 100 operatic roles from the baroque to the contemporary and the lyric to the dramatic, high respect as a pedagogue, superlative press reviews and a Helpmann Award nomination, Dr. Simon Lobelson has established himself as one of the most versatile baritones of his generation. Since graduating with first class honors from Sydney University and distinction from The Royal College of Music, Simon has worked as a soloist with companies such as Royal Opera House Covent Garden, English National Opera, Opera Australia, Opera Queensland, Pinchgut Opera, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Philharmonia, English Chamber Orchestra, Asko/Schönberg Ensemble, Israel Camerata and the Lucerne Festival, under some of the world’s leading conductors such as Boulez, Halsey, Dutoit, McCreesh, De Leeuw and Bonynge. He has appeared on several international commercial recordings and is full-time lecturer in voice and opera at the SCM, where his research specialises in contemporary opera and its associated vocalism. He has delivered papers on this at national and international conferences. He has adjudicated the Australian Singing Competition, Sydney Eisteddfod and the Australian Concerto and Vocal Competition, and has given master classes in both Australia and China, as well as having conducted the Con Opera at NIDA for the past 3 years. As a highly versatile educator he is known and respected for his erudite, urbane, direct, decisive and critically constructive teaching style: part mentor and part tormentor.

Maurice Ravel was a composer who revelled in diverse musical influences, including American ragtime and jazz. After the First World War, he collaborated with Colette on the opera L’enfant et les sortilèges. It was a meeting of sophisticated creative minds, and real-life eccentricities.

At Ravel’s request, the libretto was revised into a sequence of scenes populated by a remarkable array of characters: furniture, china, animals, trees, and, at its centre, an angry child. Each is brought vividly to life through Ravel’s richly imaginative score, which draws on styles such as music hall and jazz.

Beneath its fantastical surface, this is not simply a children’s opera. It follows the child’s journey towards maturity through developing respect for the natural world.

This is SCM’s sixth operatic collaboration with NIDA, and we are delighted to present such a distinctive work. We warmly welcome Claudia Osbourne as stage director and acknowledge co-conductor, Simon Lobelson.

Stephen Mould
Artistic Director, Con Opera

L’enfant et les sortileges contains the use of haze and low fog effects.

Please be advised that there is a 6-minute lockout at the start of the show. Latecomers will not be permitted.