It’s Friday! Edinburgh Festival
Opera has always taken its source material from elsewhere – from books, plays, folklore. But it is highly unusual, to say the least, for an opera to be based on a movie.
There have, of course, been many film versions of operas – but not the other way around.
So it was quite something when american composer Missy Mazzoli turned to the silver screen for inspiration.
Breaking the Waves is based on the 1996 film of the same name by Danish director Lars von Trier.
The story, in both the movie and opera, is controversial, to say the very least. Bess McNeill (played by emily Watson in the film) is a psychologically disturbed young woman from Skye who marries an atheist oilman called Jan Nyman – much to the disapproval of the Free presbyterian Church (which is very strong on disapproval, increasing more so as the tragic tale progresses).
When Jan returns to the oil rig, Bess misses him so desperately that she prays to her God for his immediate return. In a devastating example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, Jan has a serious accident the following day and is flown home. Bess, of course, blames herself.
The paralysed Jan, unable to function sexually, encourages Bess to take a succession of lovers and tell him of their activities, in a sort of erotic surrogacy situation. Bess is appalled, yet agrees.
Her sexual encounters become more and more extreme, she is cast out of the, erm, idiosyncratically named Free Church and is eventually savagely gang-raped by a crew of sailors.
To this point, the film and the opera are essentially the same. The respective endings, however, are not… but that is now for opera audiences to find out.
The operatic version was premiered to high acclaim by Opera philadelphia on September 22, 2016 – far from its natural home.
IT was, therefore, no less than utterly appropriate that it received its european premiere this week in a Scottish Opera production in edinburgh.
This story stands or falls on the character of Bess. Thankfully, the role in this production is taken by Californian soprano Sydney Mancasola, who turns in a simply towering performance.
She vocalises a truly tortured soul, somehow seeking both debasement and redemption.
The ecstatic agony of her voice is spine-tingling, from the quieter moments to the scream of pain.
She cannot, of course, sing an opera on her own.
In what I imagine cannot be the easiest role in the repertoire, edinburgh-born baritone Duncan
rock brings a solid believability to Jan, in what could be easily construed as the questionable character of a cripple who seeks vicarious pleasure in his religious wife having sex with strangers.
Most of the other characters really are peripheral, though their fine ensemble performance is vital to the success of the whole.
Music director Stuart Stratford conducts the Orchestra of Scottish Opera with real insight and sympathy, in what is an at times technically tricky score of up to the minute, modern music.
My only bugbear with this production was the unfortunate feeling that its sense of dramatic narrative did not altogether hang together throughout.
It took the edge off an otherwise almost perfectly dark but disturbingly good performance.