Many an opera has found its way from stage to screen. Worthy specimens of the breed include Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s colorful The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Powell’s brooding Bluebeard’s Castle (1963), Ingmar Bergman’s limpid The Magic Flute (1975), Joseph Losey’s sturdy Don Giovanni (1979), Franco Zeffirelli’s flamboyant La Traviata (1982), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s exquisite Parsifal (1982), and Penny Woolcock’s muscular The Death of Klinghoffer (2003), the most politically controversial of the bunch. Video recordings of stage productions have also proliferated in recent years, a growing number of which can be acquired as DVDs or streamed at will via Metropolitan Opera on Demand and similar services.
Not surprisingly, much can be lost when a genuinely grand opera is reduced to the size of a video screen; for one example, numerous moment-to-moment choices by video director Don Kent make the towering Philip Glass-Robert Wilson masterpiece Einstein on the Beach less impressive on DVD than in any of the live performances I have seen, going back to its American debut at the Met in 1976. At least one opera-film auteur believed that even the most generous movie-theater screen is dinky when compared with a first-rate opera stage. “The proscenium is so much larger than that little stamp of a screen,” Zeffirelli told me when his sumptuous film of La Traviata opened in 1983. In retrospect, he said, “I should have given the picture more splendor, like Ben-Hur or the old D.W. Griffith movies.” Still, the loss of opera-house immediacy and scale can be compensated for by increased availability to audiences outside the urban areas where most opera houses reside.
Lately a complementary trend has been gathering steam as composers, librettists, and opera companies turn to cinema for ideas and inspiration. The first important instances were Glass’s stage operas based on Jean Cocteau films: Orphée, written and directed by Cocteau in 1950 and adapted by Glass in 1991; Les Enfants Terribles, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville from Cocteau’s screenplay in 1950 and adapted by Glass in 1993; and La Belle et la Bête, written and directed by Cocteau in 1946 and adapted by Glass in 1994. The practice has continued with Jake Heggie’s timely and moving 2000 adaptation of Tim Robbins’s 1995 Dead Man Walking and Kevin Puts’ multilingual Silent Night, a Pulitzer Prize winner of 2011 based on Christian Carion’s 2005 film Joyeaux Noël. The 2016 season brought Thomas Adès’s oneiric The Exterminating Angel, based on Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic of 1962, and Missy Mazzoli’s appropriately jagged adaptation of Lars von Trier’s 1996 Breaking the Waves, complete with Ennio Morricone-esque electric-guitar sounds, a nod to the movie’s own soundtrack.
(Parenthetically, it is worth noting that the challenges of promoting these new works in the ultraconservative world of grand opera has occasionally led to bits of Hollywood-style ballyhoo. When the Met mounted The Exterminating Angel, press reports trumpeted a historic event embedded in the performance: the singing of the highest pitch ever essayed by a diva on the Met’s venerable stage. The event proved anticlimactic—more a vocal screech than a musical tone, and brief enough to be gone almost before it registered—but history in the making is always fun to experience.)
At this writing the most recent film-related opera is Nico Muhly’s 2018 Marnie, the second Met production by this gifted and enormously versatile composer. (His first was the interestingly melodramatic Two Boys, which debuted in London in 2011 and at the Met in 2014.) To be precise, the elegant and engaging Marnie is not directly based on the flawed but indelible Alfred Hitchcock movie of 1964, but rather on the 1961 novel by Winston Graham that inspired the Hitchcock version. Muhly and librettist Nicholas Wright retained the novel’s setting of England in the 1950s, partly for the excellent reason that however ingenious a 21st-century woman might be at stealing company funds, changing her identity at will, and eluding capture over a period of years, today’s ubiquitous trails of electronic information would surely bring her down as soon as anyone noticed that something was amiss. This context still leaves the question of why Muhly and his collaborators chose to adapt Graham’s novel instead of the very famous Hitchcock film, and Muhly told me that from his point of view the movie—like all Hitchcock movies—is simply too cinematic for a stage adaptation to be effective. You can have a great experience watching a Hitchcock film with the volume off, he says, whereas in opera the sonic dimension obviously reigns.
The music of Muhly’s Marnie is as dramatic as the narrative and as mercurial as the heroine, embellished with unusual structures, including “links” in place of arias, meant to suggest Marnie’s momentary state of mind; characters paired with specific instruments (Marnie with oboe, her mother with viola, Mark with trombone, his brother Terry with muted trumpet); and a quartet of Shadow Marnies in the cast, representing hidden aspects of the title character’s personality. The large-scale production calls for 18 soloists—one of whom (Terry) is a countertenor—and a sizable orchestra. Michael Meyer’s production enhanced the Met production with artful projections enabling the frequent scene changes and facilitating such visually demanding material as the foxhunt where Marnie’s beloved horse Forio breaks a leg. Like the Hitchcock movie, Muhly’s opera has to leap an extra hurdle in the current climate of zero tolerance for male sexual aggression, and the production’s dramaturg, Paul Cremo, told me that the Met worked long and hard to strike a proper moral tone in the ever-troubling scene where Mark tries to force himself on unwilling Marnie after their wedding. The solutions settled upon seemed satisfactory to me.
Thanks in large part to Meyer’s visual contributions, Marnie is about as cinematic as a stage-bound opera can be, surpassed only by the aforementioned Glass productions, wherein (during full-scale performances) the live music is accompanied by screenings of the films themselves. There is no requirement for a film-related opera to mimic cinematic techniques, of course, but productions I have seen of operas mentioned here have combined solid musical values with solid visual aesthetics. I am thinking of Heggie’s Dead Man Walking at both the Washington National Opera and the Baltimore Lyric Opera, Silent Night at the WNO, and The Exterminating Angel at the Met, which I saw in a live theatrical HD transmission, a format that brings music and movie together in still another way. As divergent as their histories have been, opera and cinema are different yet complementary means of approaching the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk that Richard Wagner theorized more than a century and a half ago. Their occasional convergence is a fascinating phenomenon to ponder.
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David Sterritt
David Sterritt is Editor-in-Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He wrote frequently on music and theater during almost four decades as film critic and cultural correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor.