Brokeback Mountain (opera)

Composition history

In 2007, Wuorinen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, saw the 2005 film directed by Ang Lee and "was inspired by its operatic possibilities." He approached Proulx with the idea of turning her short story into an opera and "to ask for her blessing to adapt the story for opera. Proulx went one step further, offering to write the libretto".

As recounted by Ashifa Kassam:

After reading Proulx' tale of doomed lovers, composer Charles Wuorinen knew he had the makings of a tragic opera. "In older operas there would be an illegitimate child or difference of social classes," said Wuorinen. "Same-sex love, especially when it takes place in an environment where it's absolutely forbidden, is a contemporary version of the same eternal problem."

Gerard Mortier, the incoming General Director of the New York City Opera, arranged to commission the work. When Mortier abruptly left the New York City Opera in 2008, the project was in limbo for a time, but he took it with him to his new post as General Director of Teatro Real in Madrid.

Work on the opera was started in August 2008 and completed in February 2012. As Kennicott notes:

While other composers might have found the taciturn and often painfully inarticulate characters a challenge, Wuorinen was inspired. Brokeback Mountain was a struggle toward the possibility of expression, about a groping toward language and awareness and self-knowledge. "I take the position that since it takes a long time for any word to get out, that what is laconic on the page can seem quite expansive on the opera stage," he says.

Performance history

The world premiere took place 28 January 2014 in Madrid directed by Ivo van Hove and conducted by Titus Engel. The opera received its German premiere in Aachen on 7 December 2014 in a new production directed by Ludger Englels and conducted by Kazem Abdullah. A chamber version for 24 players was commissioned by the Salzburger Landestheater and premiered on 27 February 2016, directed by Jacopo Spirei, and conducted by Adrian Kelly.

Synopsis

The two-hour opera is performed without intermission.

Music

Wuorinen has been described as an "unabashedly complex Modernist." The composer expressed his views on the kind of musical idiom suited to this subject matter – and to his own tastes in music:

"Opera should deploy the full resources of musical composition and not be restricted to any kind of model, including a model of what is lyric singing," says Wuorinen. The composer's personal litany of great opera is revealing – the works of Monteverdi, "some of Wagner," Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, and of course the operas of Alban Berg. "You can tell where my sympathies lie."

Wuorinen used Schoenberg's half-sung, half-spoken Sprechstimme as a way for the character of Ennis to express himself in the early part of the opera. He does not develop sung lines until the second act, as before that he cannot acknowledge who he really is. Schoenberg had used this technique for his character of Moses, who was unable to put "complex thought into comprehensible words." He associates the two leads with different musical pitches, "B-natural and C-sharp, a whole step apart, yet divided by a third tonal area associated with the mountain itself, based on a low C."

Commenting on the formal qualities of Wuorinen's work, Gerard Mortier said:

Wuorinen understood that he could support Proulx's idea through his music, but also that he needed a great formal conception to avoid sentimentalism, just as Wagner did ... Next to the film of Brokeback Mountain, which was rather sentimental and closer to Puccini, Wuorinen will serve the essential dimension of Annie Proulx's fabulous novel.

Instrumentation

The orchestral score calls for:

Reception

Philip Kennicott of Opera News said that Wuorinen and Proulx had made a work in which "Brokeback Mountain remains as rugged and wild as the landscape that plays an intimate role in shaping the characters' lives."

Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times described it as "a serious work, an impressive achievement. But it is a hard opera to love." He said Wuorinen had written "an intricate, vibrantly orchestrated and often brilliant score that conveys the oppressiveness of the forces that defeat these two men" but suggested that the complexity of his music at times weighed down the drama. He described the production by director Ivo van Hove as "starkly beautiful" and credited Mortier with being the champion for this ambitious work. Tommasini noted that Proulx had given Ennis a "kind of plain-spoken elegance" in the libretto and opened her original story. Ennis becomes reflective after he and Jack have their first sexual encounter: "We look down on them hawks./We look down on them pine trees./We're like eagles, Jack." Tommasini says this is "matched by a fleeting burst of lyricism in Mr. Wuorinen's vocal writing."

Andrew Clements of The Guardian said that the music was rather dry and "etiolated" and seldom "transcends the text enough to enhance the drama rather than just adding rather terse punctuation and commentary to it." He said the performances of the singers and orchestra were excellent, but thought it should have been staged with a more spare setting. Clements also thought that Proulx had added too many elements to the libretto, clouding the plot.

It received mixed reviews, as the Spanish press was "broadly positive."

Video

In 2015 the recording of the world premiere at the Teatro Real of Madrid was released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Bel Air Classiques.