Composers have always mined familiar stories for their texts, although Charles Wuorinen, whose Brokeback Mountain premieres tonight in Madrid, has gone back to the source rather than the screen version of this timeless story
Charles Wuorinen's opera on Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain is anything but an adaptation of the movie. For a start, the opera features Proulx's own libretto, whereas the author did not write the screenplay for the Oscar-winning movie. As Proulx told me for this week's Music Matters, creating her own opera libretto from her 1997 story was about compressing the already heightened, concise world of the short story still further into the distilled essentials that the characters will sing on stage at the world premiere at the Teatro Real in Madrid tonight. Wuorinen says that he wanted to do something that the film didn't: instead of the beautifying effects of the cinematography on the mountainous landscape of the North American West, the opera returns to the sense of threat, of danger, of hard-fought existence that the Wyoming mountains are really about, something that's there in the story but less apparent in Ang Lee's film. You can hear that even in the brief excerpts from the opera that underscore this interview: the mountain looms in that ominous orchestral chord, which becomes a kind of leitmotif for the multiple threats to Jack and Ennis' love as the opera develops.
But if the opera isn't an adaptation of the film, the amount of coverage and interest Wuorinen's Brokeback Mountain has received is largely thanks to the movie's success, as well as, of course, the resonances of the drama, at once a great and tragic romance, and a story that contributes to debates about sexuality and society that will always be relevant. And just as it's become common for Broadway and the West End to turn to the cinema for stories to shape into shows and musicals, the opera world has been doing the same thing in recent years. The Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch, who creates the role of Ennis tonight in Madrid, was also a lead in Howard Shore's opera with David Cronenberg on The Fly - an opera based on the movie - and Okulitch also starred in Jake Heggie's opera Dead Man Walking, telling the story of Sister Helen Prejean's book, which was most famous thanks to Tim Robbins's film. Gerald Barry's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant at ENO is another film-inspired opera, albeit based on a play and a movie with less of a hold on the public's imagination. There are plenty of other examples of opera's with filmic connections and inspirations too: André Previn's Brief Encounter, Olga Neuwirth's Lost Highway, Tobias Picker's Dolores Claiborne.
As Okulitch told me, it makes sense that composers should look to the cinema for inspiration. Operas have always called on the stories we have in common: that once meant myths, fairy-stories, or plays from earlier centuries, but today's myths are made in the movies. There's solid commercial sense in looking to the stock of film stories for new operas or musicals - audiences want to feel they have some connection with what they're seeing. But once they're sitting in the opera house, the composer and creative team can take the audience to different places than any film could. Wuorinen's Brokeback Mountain ought to do exactly that, and anyone who expects to see or hear the film on stage will, hopefully, be positively shocked, as the uncompromising rigour and robustness of Wuorinen's musical language takes the story of Jack and Ennis into the universalising world of the opera stage. A few hours away from the premiere, that's Wuorinen's and Proulx's hope, at least!
Andrew Clements's review of the new opera will be published tomorrow.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jan/28/brokeback-mountain-opera-annie-proulx
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