William Crozier

Commissioned by Music Theatre Wales in 2008 and subsequently gifted by the artist

Original canvas. The work appears in excellent original condition, clean and ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals no signs of retouching. Held in a simple wooden box frame.
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The present lot was a commission for the Music Theatre Wales, one of Europe's leading contemporary opera companies. 

In 2008, the artistic director, Michael McCarthy, aware of Crozier’s lifelong interest in colour, the landscape and Hispanic culture, invited him to create a painting to use in publicity for a new opera then in development ‘Letters of a Love Betrayed’.  The opera was based on the novel Eva Luna by the notable Chilean author, Isabel Allende, and had its world premiere at the Royal Opera House in 2009.

William Crozier was a passionate opera-lover and he leapt at the opportunity. He wrote to McCarthy at the time:

“This is the first picture I have ever painted which does not have its origin in something I have seen. The image is borrowed from a similar scorching landscape I knew when I lived in the mountains of Andalusia. I was also led by the scenario of the opera and the imaginary landscapes of Allende and other Latin American novelists and poets, Marquez and Neruda chief among them.

[...]

I also wanted to use broad blocks of colour that bore some relation to the landscape written in the text, but also hinted at the colour combinations of a flag of some distant or exotic nation, an imaginary Latin America, if you like…I have enjoyed working on this painting and my pleasure will be complete when I hear the music which I could only envisage in my mind’s eye"

On 4^th March 2009 Crozier presented his painting at a reception to introduce ‘Letters of a Love Betrayed’ to an invited audience at 49, Queen Anne’s Gate, London. The opera had its premier at the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 2^nd October 2009.