Upload at the Dutch National Opera review – it’s opera, but not as you know it. ..

A sustained, low A flat buzzes as cosmic background noise at the opening of Upload. Modulating eerily to D flat, a dark, sci-fi world emerges in shadow. If you’re a Matrix Resurrections fan and relish weird, Upload will float your boat. But, is it opera at all? It is an unusual melange of music, filmed narrative and special effects. 

In Michael van der Aa’s latest offering, a man undergoes a transformation from a vulnerable human being to an immortal digital entity. He hopes! This is hubris, up there with Midas’ gold obsession and Janacek’s The Makropulos Case, the opera with the 300-year-old heroine, Emilia Makropulos, seeking an elixir booster that would keep her going until 2300. Emilia’s perverse refusal to “Get Boosted Now” results in her crumbling in front of the audience. Antivaxxer campaigners, please note.

In Upload, a father has a digital version of himself made, hoping this will make him happier. He is taking advantage of a service offered by a Swiss tech company. The obvious topical reference is to the likes of Dignitas, which offers the exact opposite. The point about exploiting the ability to “take control” is, however, common. 

The father is sung by British baritone Roderick Williams. The last step in upload world is renouncing the physical body, after which customers can live on as an upload. Think hologram man in a USB memory stick.

In this manifestation, the father comes back home to the daughter, performed by American soprano du jour – she featured on the final 2021 cover of Opera News – Julia Bullock. She didn’t know about her father’s decision to have himself uploaded and tries to come to grips with him. Big questions. Why did he decide to do it? Is he the same person? And will it be possible for them to carry on like this?

“Jim, it’s opera, but not as we know it.” Star Trek’s Scotty, manipulating his rising note transporter and sparkly disintegrating bodies, would have known all about van der Aa’s creation. For Upload is as groundbreaking an artform as was the USS Enterprise’s technology.

Michel van der Aa is a groundbreaker, fixated with creating theatrical performances combining music, video and modern techno hoopla. He is also obsessed with the possibility of living after physical death. After Life (2006), van der Aa’s first effort for Dutch National, was a moving combination of opera and video, based on a 1998 film by Japanese director, Hirokazu Koreeda, about people who are passed to another life after death.

Upload, which opened at Dutch National Opera on October 1 can be seen on Medici tv here. It arrives – Covid willing – at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in spring 2022. It takes the “film-opera” format of After Life to a new level. 

Purists might argue that this is not opera at all. Still, what producer worth his/her salt has not been tempted over the four centuries since opera’s Venice big bang to use emerging technology to sharpen delivery of their fiendish plots?

In a musical setting of his own libretto, Van der Aa has created a science fiction story about an attempt to let the mind continue its life digitally after a self-chosen corporeal death. The wish to prevent the loss of valuable knowledge and memories after the death of the body is sort of old fashioned. It used to be called autobiography. But Upload goes a step further.

Here is how the work unfolds. After the death of his wife, a father hears of a way to continue his life and the relationship with his daughter. There’s an added bonus. He will not suffer the traumas and the emotional pain his physical life has caused him. The uploaded Father v.2 can be tweaked.

The cut from singing to a documentary-style explanation of the purpose of the clinic is masterful. Presented in the authoritative format of BBC Horizon science documentaries, bland apparatchik smoothies explain the process of uploading and death amid sci-fi scanner backdrops in the reassuring tones of a practice nurse about to lance a troublesome boil. 

“It’s all very simple. You only have to die first”. This line ranks in black comedy with Lady Moping’s dismissive comment in Evelyn Waugh’s Mr Lovejoy’s Little Outing about her husband’s attempted suicide. “He attempted to hang himself in the orangery – in front of the Chester-Martins!” More social gaffe than a plea for help.

After his self-chosen death, the father is uploaded as a “mindfile,” and his daughter is suddenly confronted with a digital parent who can speak, think, even feel and make himself visible on a screen, but has no physical body. 

Not only has touching and hugging become impossible, but the daughter realises her father will go on living after her. The situation becomes even more complicated because the upload does not have the desired result. Father is miserable.

There is no opportunity to reboot, and the father is forced to put his fate in the hands of his daughter. She will have to decide whether or not to “delete” him, which will end his digital existence forever.

The spare structure of the opera allows van der Aa to tell his story in a sequence of short scenes on a nearly empty stage with only the two soloists and small group of musicians, almost invisible, within sight lines.

The father exists most of the time as projected by motion capture cameras. Upload deploys film footage representing the months in the laboratory during which the upload was prepared and performed. These moments are often enchanting, but the first half of Upload’s eighty-five minutes are more a movie than conventionally staged opera.

The audience is under no illusion that the father’s decision has been a mistake. As tension increases between father and daughter, the dramatic importance of the music does as well. The colourful score, written for eleven musicians, has a strong cinematic character, enhanced by cleverly integrated electronic effects. 

The orchestral sections – strongly pulsating, with unexpected rhythmic accents and lyrical solo lines – are precisely delivered by Otto Tausk and the Ensemble Muziekfabriek. 

The libretto has been crafted to assist audiences in following the plot. The singers made the most of van der Aa’s sound world, embracing melodic declamation, that strongly favours the intelligibility of the text. Outstanding examples are the first and last scenes, with a series of almost whispered words about body warmth and physical touching. Not options for an Upload. 

Upload becomes real “opera” when the warm baritone voice of Roderick Williams shares the startling insight that in his transformation he has lost more than his body. His scheme has failed. Facing the unavoidable decision to “delete” her own father, Julia Bullock creates a musical drama of the first order. She is the total focus of attention on an almost empty stage. 

Williams and Bullock’s last scene together is poignant. On a gigantic screen, unrolled from the edge of the stage over the heads of the entire audience to the ridge of the theatre, the enlarged faces of father and daughter meet for the last time in a harmonious farewell. Delete!

What’s the point? Upload is for an era where ethical choices about our lives, how we live them and seek to prolong them, are increasingly more pressing than ever. That’s what makes it a relevant, thought-provoking commentary for today.

From Dr. He Jankui’s rule-breaking creation of gene-edited twins in China in 2019, to the offering of questionable stem cell therapy promising eternal life in Russian clinics, we are under pressure to stave off inevitable death or dictate our present life’s structure. 

Michael van der Aa’s work is a timely reminder that embracing the scientifically possible may have unforeseen consequences, impacting the lives of others. Compelling viewing, a moral tale, beautifully crafted and presented, Upload may not be opera as we know it – but it is opera.