Paus' Hate Songs was published in 2014, and was included on Tora Augestad's and the Oslo Philharmonic's album Portraying Passion: Works by Weill/Paus/Ives (2018) with works by Paus, Kurt Weill and Charles Ives; it has received critical acclaim[1][2][3] and was awarded the Spellemannprisen (Norwegian Grammy Award) for 2018 in the Classical class.
[4] Paus' Hate Songs is based on the poem "Women: A Hate Song" published by Parker in Vanity Fair in 1916[5] and subsequent poems that have been described as "a photo-book of New York with the female caricatures that Parker abhorred or despised, notably idle bourgeois ladies, who were the object of patriarchal worship as angelic domestic creatures.
[3] Albrecht Thiemann, editor of Opernwelt, called the work "a captivatingly orchestrated, spirit-sparkling opus" and "a coup that provides an immense listening pleasure.
With this work, Paus highlights a woman hardly known in Europe who attacked the social roles and conventions of her time with pointed sarcasm: the New York writer and critic Dorothy Parker (1893–1967).
One of her best works is a series of lyrically rhapsodizing, caustically comical swear prose in which she settles accounts of all kinds with personal objects of hatred.