Ruth Leon recommends…Free access to Brokeback Mountain
Ruth Leon recommendsBrokeback Mountain – Teatro Real de Madrid
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This is a modern opera adaptation by Charles Wuorinen and Annie Proulx, based on Annie Proulx’s short story previously adapted by Ang Lee for the Oscar-winning film Brokeback Mountain. This production was directed by Ivo van Hove for the Teatro Real de Madrid, with their Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Titus Engel.
Brokeback Mountain marked Wuorinen’s return to the opera stage with one of the most ambitious works of his career. Both beautiful and tragic, Brokeback Mountain is the story of the doomed love between ranch hand Ennis del Mar (Daniel Okulitch) and rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Tom Randle), two young men from a very homophobic society, who meet and fall in love on a fictional Wyoming mountain in 1963.
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Why ruin a perfectly wrought short story and a fine cinematic rendition with such ugly music?
The director’s comments are inane. First, they are not “cowboys”, they are sheep herders for a summer. It is not American Cowboy Mythology. Second, who cares they are “real American singers”, does he know how many “real American singers” are trained in Europe and big American cities, and have never set foot on a ranch or a farm or even a petting zoo with sheep?
As we know, European early modernism is best to convey ugliness, alienation, hopeless nihilism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo1JAYEOzIc
… so, the best choice for a silly opera which seems to show that one better adapts to Midwest sixties mores.
Neither midwest (Wyoming) not sixties.
Other than that, I can’t follow your syntax.
This feeble geography & syntax irritates the hell out of me
Sally
I made a typo.
The director thinks because the leads are American they already know how to wear cowboy hats and boots? That’s a laugh. In the cities seeing anyone wearing cowboy attire is an extreme rarity. It’s a beautiful story completely ruined with modern, tuneless music. I can’t help but think that a more lyrical approach would serve the libretto better. Recently the Arizona Opera commissioned a beauty of an opera: Riders of the Purple Sage with a gorgeous, lyrical score the audience could identify with. Wuorinen could have learned a thing or two from Puccini or Menotti about connecting with listeners.
Is this the opera which contains the line (worthy of Tippett) “I can’t find my dungarees” or something like that?