'Brokeback Mountain' Joining 'The Bonesetter's Daughter' And 'An Inconvenient Truth' As America Takes Delayed Steps Toward National Operatic Culture
"Brokeback Mountain, the short story by Annie Proulx that spawned the 2005 movie, is to be adapted into an opera.
The New York City Opera announced Sunday it had commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose a piece based on the 1997 story, which became the basis for the Ang Lee-directed film.
"Ever since encountering Annie Proulx's extraordinary story I have wanted to make an opera on it, and it gives me great joy that Gerard Mortier and New York City Opera have given me the opportunity to do so," Wuorinen said in a statement.
The opera will open in spring 2013." ...
CBCNews.com "Brokeback Mountain to be adapted into an opera" June 8, 2008
Albert Bierstadt "San Francisco Bay" 1871-73. Smithsonian American Art Museum [not to be confused with the Washington NATIONAL Opera, which is now threatening to break its recent promise to Congress and the American people to produce one American opera each and every season.]
Image credit: (c) Smithsonian American Art Museum. Washington, D.C. With thanks.
The New York City Opera announced Sunday it had commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose a piece based on the 1997 story, which became the basis for the Ang Lee-directed film.
"Ever since encountering Annie Proulx's extraordinary story I have wanted to make an opera on it, and it gives me great joy that Gerard Mortier and New York City Opera have given me the opportunity to do so," Wuorinen said in a statement.
The opera will open in spring 2013." ...
CBCNews.com "Brokeback Mountain to be adapted into an opera" June 8, 2008
Albert Bierstadt "San Francisco Bay" 1871-73. Smithsonian American Art Museum [not to be confused with the Washington NATIONAL Opera, which is now threatening to break its recent promise to Congress and the American people to produce one American opera each and every season.]
Image credit: (c) Smithsonian American Art Museum. Washington, D.C. With thanks.
posted by Garth Trinkl at 6:36 AM
5 Comments:
I have grave doubts about a renaissance of American opera when the subjects are Brokeback Mountain and Gore's highly inaccurate potboiler. Then again, perhaps that fact that A.I.T. is leavened with such melodrama will help put it over the top.
Here's a subject for an opera: The Disappearance by the forgotten Philip Wylie.
Thanks for your comment, JW.
What are you waiting for? When are you going to get to work on your Philip Wyle libretto?
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And how about operas on Flann O Brien's The Third Policeman or B. Traven's The Death Ship -- both of which were once recommended to me as subjects for opera?
PS. I'm still looking forward to Henry Hadley's The Ocean being performed at the John F. Kennedy Center. I thought of it most recently when listening to Vladimir Ashknazy conduct Sibelius's The Oceanides at the KC.
http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/?fuseaction=composition&composition_id=2864
I wouldn't be the one to write a libretto. The score, definitely, that's where my training lie.
I too look forward to hearing The Ocean at the K.C., no matter who conducts it!
JW, then you're going to have to find yourself a librettist and treat her or him respectfully and fairly. I will be looking forward to your new American opera.
And personally, I would prefer to hear Henry Hadley's The Ocean performed at the John F. Kennedy Center under a certain distinguished younger American conductor who has already championed and recorded that and many other fine works of American classical music (works banned on Sharon Percy Rockefeller's reactionary WETA-FM, public radio in the Nation's Capital, which prefers to turn the clock back by repeatedly programming Frederick the Great of Prussia and now Archduke Rudolph Of Austria).
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Montezuma anyone at the Washington NATIONAL Opera? (Roger Sessions' opera, that is; and not that of Frederick the Great; which Sharon Rockefeller's team will probably recommend to Placido Domingo in lieu of the annual American opera promised by the NATIONAL Opera company to Congress and to the American people.)
Hey, thanks for mentioning Hadley. There are a lot of fine composers who have fallen into desuetude, but none to the degree of Hadley, and none less deserving of such a fate. I am determined that he gets his due from his home country. Every little bit helps.
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