Operatic
Cowboys in Love, Onstage
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Tom Randle, left, as Jack Twist, and Daniel
Okulitch, right, as Ennis del Mar, in "Brokeback Mountain." Carlos
Alvarez/Getty Images
MADRID — When the news came five years ago that Charles
Wuorinen was writing an opera based on “Brokeback Mountain,” the
1997 Annie Proulx short story that was made into an
Oscar-winning film in 2005, it seemed at first a baffling mismatch of composer
and subject. Mr. Wuorinen, 75, built his reputation as and remains an
unabashedly complex Modernist. “Brokeback Mountain” is the immensely sad tale
of the impossible love between two Wyoming cowboys.
But over time, the idea of a Wuorinen adaptation of “Brokeback
Mountain” grew more intriguing. One certainly did not want some sentimental
score for this wrenching tragedy set in the rugged American West. The project
seemed more promising still when it was announced that Ms. Proulx would be
writing the libretto, her first effort in this genre.
The premiere of “Brokeback Mountain,” one of the most anticipated events of the
international opera season, took place at the Teatro Real here on Tuesday
night. It is a serious work, an impressive achievement. But it is a hard opera
to love.
Mr. Wuorinen has written
an intricate, vibrantly orchestrated and often brilliant score that conveys the
oppressiveness of the forces that defeat these two men, whose lives we follow
over 20 years, starting in 1963, when they take a summer job herding sheep on
Brokeback Mountain. But the same qualities in Mr. Wuorinen’s music that can
captivate listeners — ingenious complexity, lucid textures, tartly atonal
harmonic writing — too often weigh down the drama in this work.
To his credit, there is not one saccharine or melodramatic touch in
the score. Still, you yearn for the music to sing, to convey the moments of
romantic bliss and sensual pleasure that the uptight Ennis Del Mar and his more
daring companion, Jack Twist, experience. For long stretches, though, Mr.
Wuorinen’s music comes across as a little too brainy and relentlessly busy.
That this ambitious opera made it to a stage at all, let alone in this
starkly beautiful production by the director Ivo van Hove, is due almost
entirely to the commitment of the impresario Gerard Mortier, who has championed
contemporary opera throughout his career. Mr. Mortier originally commissioned
the work for the New York City Opera after he was named its director. When he
and City Opera parted ways in late 2008, before his official
tenure there had begun, Mr. Mortier brought the project to Teatro Real, where
he became artistic director in 2010. The Madrid company took over the project.
Then, last fall, City Opera folded, and Mr. Mortier announced he was battling cancer. When he tried
to steer the choice of a successor, the Teatro Real board ousted him. He is now
an artistic adviser to the company.
There was no hint of tension, though, during a news conference that
Mr. Mortier, looking very thin but exuding enthusiasm, held with Mr. Wuorinen
and Ms. Proulx at the house before the performance Tuesday. Ms. Proulx made
some interesting and pointed comments about the film version, directed by Ang
Lee, especially the somewhat romanticized qualities of the storytelling, the
lush scenic depictions of the mountains and the invented episodes, like the
“trial girlfriend,” as she put it, for Ennis after his marriage breaks up.
Yet, in her libretto, to serve the conventions of the opera genre, Ms.
Proulx also opens up the story line and, now and then, lends poetic elegance to
the dialogue. In her short story, Ennis is defined by his inarticulate ways: He
mostly speaks in short, stunted phrases. In the libretto, he sometimes speaks
with a kind of plain-spoken elegance. After he and Jack have their first
impulsive sexual experience, Ennis becomes unusually reflective: “We look down
on them hawks./We look down on them pine trees./We’re like eagles, Jack.” It’s
a poignant touch, matched by a fleeting burst of lyricism in Mr. Wuorinen’s
vocal writing.
But fleeting is the word for the score’s
lyrical stretches. As he said in the news conference, Mr. Wuorinen practices
the craft of “natural prosody,” that is, setting a text to music so the words
come through, something he does admirably in this two-hour opera, performed
without a break.
Yet, almost continually, no matter what is happening
onstage — when Ennis and Jack are seized with fear over being caught, desperate
with longing, drunkenly carousing by the campfire or bickering with their wives
— some fidgety, skittish, pointillist instrumental line is darting about in the
orchestra. There is not enough differentiation of musical character, a lack
that dulls the dramatic richness and intensity, despite the pulsing, incisive
performance that the conductor Titus Engel draws from the orchestra.
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Mr. Randle and Mr.
Okulitch. Gerard Julien/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“Brokeback” opens hauntingly. Like some
modernist Wyoming version of “Das Rheingold,” there is a low, droning pedal
tone in the orchestra, over which flecks of music emerge, swell and fade away.
Whenever Mr. Wuorinen, with his keen ear for bracing harmony, allows sonorities
to linger without all the busyness, the music becomes more mystical and dreamy.
In his score, Mr. Wuorinen strives to convey
that the mountain terrain of Wyoming is a dangerous region where you can easily
die from sudden hail, bitter cold, precipitous cliffs or attacking animals. In
the opening scenes of Mr. van Hove’s simple, spare and effective production,
the mountains are depicted in Tal Yarden’s vivid, flowing and ominous videos, shot
in Wyoming.
The cast, to a member, embraces every chance
to maximize every lyrical bit in the vocal writing. The rich-voiced
bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch gives his all to the role of
Ennis. Tall, handsome and an instinctive actor, Mr. Okulitch embodies the
character from the moment we first see him, his cowboy hat almost covering his
eyes, his stride nervous and halting. Mr. Wuorinen sets Ennis’s initial lines
in a half-spoken Sprechstimme. Only as Ennis becomes involved with Jack does he
open up some and sing outright.
The tenor Tom Randle
brings a youthful voice and eager manner to Jack. Wiry and needy, this Jack
knows what he wants and never stops asking for it, though he cannot get Ennis
to make the same leap. The scenes of the two bare-chested men in bed together
are tender and natural.
The opera gives Alma, Ennis’s wife, an
introductory scene that is not in the story or the film. We see her bright and
hopeful as she shops for a wedding dress with her mother and spends more than
the meager family budget allows. As sung by the radiant soprano Heather Buck,
Alma is an impulsive young woman who thinks the sullen Ennis may actually be
her means of escaping ranch life and living properly in town. But she is not
dumb, as she tells Ennis during a horrible fight, and comes to know the truth
about him. The winning mezzo-soprano Hannah Esther Minutillo is the tough-talking,
college-educated and ambitious Lureen, Jack’s wife.
Ethan Herschenfeld, as Aguirre, the bullying
sheep rancher who gives Ennis and Jack work that crucial summer on Brokeback
Mountain, appears later on as the ghost of Lureen’s father, who makes explicit
to her in a dream, abetted by a chorus, what kind of man Jack really is. In the
news conference, Ms. Proulx said that Mr. Wuorinen had suggested this nod to
the opera tradition and she went along. Good thing. The scene is one of the
score’s most distinctive.
As of now, the only definite plans to present
“Brokeback Mountain” elsewhere are for a new production at Theater Aachen,
in Germany, next season. Mr. Mortier is on the case. The final scene hints at
what this work might have been.
Jack is dead. Ennis, now alone, clutches two
old shirts, his and Jack’s, bloodied from a fight they had during their last
night that first summer, shirts Jack kept, in secret, for 20 years. Ennis sings
an emotional soliloquy. You cannot imagine the Ennis of the short story, or the
film, voicing the thoughts he sings here, like “It was only you in my life, and
it will always be only you.” But this is opera, and while not diluting his
harmonic language, Mr. Wuorinen gives Ennis an extended passage of disarming
lyrical elegance. If only there had been more such passages.
“Brokeback Mountain” continues through Feb. 11
at the Teatro Real, Madrid; teatro-real.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/arts/music/lyrical-cowboys-in-love-on-stage.html?rref=arts/music&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Music&pgtype=article
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