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Music|Opera ReviewOperatic Cowboys in Love, OnstageBy ANTHONY TOMMASINI
JAN. 29, 2014
Tom Randle, left, as Jack Twist, and Daniel Okulitch, right, as Ennis del Mar, in "Brokeback Mountain."
Mr. Randle and Mr. Okulitch.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.
“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.
