The Fredösphere

I like James MacMillan.  He's generous to choirs with his compositional output.  I have no desire to dwell on his less successful works.  Nevertheless, when I belatedly noticed this negative review of the January premiere of his opera Parthenogenesis, I just had to mention its truly weird premise:

In 1944, a young German woman was caught in an Allied bombing raid on Hanover. The trauma of the attack, so we are told, caused cells in her womb to begin to divide. Nine months later, though still a virgin, she gave birth to a daughter who was an identical copy of herself. This story, reputedly true, forms the basis of James MacMillan's music-theatre piece Parthenogenesis. Its London premiere, given by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, formed the centrepiece of the last day of the BBC's weekend survey of MacMillan's work.

"Reputedly true."  I like the way those two hot little words are dropped nicely into the lead paragraph.  So, can we confirm this story?  Google is not telling me; instead, it coughed up the chronology of the Marvel Comics Universe and Brooba, a Japanese-made Tarzan movie.

Parthenogenesis was one of four results of a project that grouped artists and theologians into "pods" (an unfortunate choice of words) to created new works.  Here's the announcement.  MacMillan sees in the story a kind of mirror-image of Christ's incarnation.

Here's the opera's synopsis.  Brace yourselves:  they found a way to make this deeply weird story weirder:

Coded sounds transform into a heartbeat. The voice of Anna, a clone-child to be, is heard speaking as if an adult, bitter that she is only her mother’s twin, cursed to have no identity of her own. Her mother, Kristel, is visited by Bruno, appearing to her as an angel but one who seems earthbound, perhaps fallen. She asks if he is her Gabriel, her guardian or her Azazel? Anna mocks them both, suspicious that Bruno is in love with Kristel's mortality, declaring that this is no annunciation. Bruno questions the absence of kindness, but Kristel explains that humanity has been torn apart by war. Anna describes how her life-code is determined by her sister-mother-stranger – Adenine, Cytosine, Thymine, Guanine – that is what Bruno is foretelling through his worldliness. Bruno yearns for mortal experience and challenges Kristel to cleanse the world through accepting him. Kristel offers to heal humanity's scars through kissing Bruno's wounds.

Oh my.