ABSTRACT
The Transposed Heads, an opera in six scenes with a playing time of around 75 minutes, was Glanville-Hicks's first major operatic venture and the first large-scale work based on the melody-rhythm concept. Glanville-Hicks's first creative challenge in writing the opera was the libretto, which she herself crafted, through a process of textual deletion, from h.T. Loweporter's 1941 English translation of Thomas Mann's novella Die vertauschten Kopfe. Glanville-Hicks was commissioned to write The Transposed Heads, the first commission to be awarded under the new initiative. The Transposed Heads, she wrote, met her structural, theatrical and literary needs. It was, moreover, a hindu legend and as such it offered 'an opportunity to use actual indian themes of folk and classic origin as point of departure for the music'. A further Western influence that carries through to The Transposed Heads is the neoclassicism which had underpinned Glanville-Hicks's works of the 1940s.
