Opera’s bold leap into film territory
In “Breaking the Waves” — both the haunting, virtuosic 1996 film by director Lars von Trier and the recent operatic adaptation that received a triumphant local premiere from West Edge Opera on Saturday, Aug. 10 — Bess McNeill, a young religious woman in a tiny Scottish seaside village, gives herself up to a life of prostitution to help her husband recover from a nearfatal industrial accident.
There’s no need to inquire how this calculus is supposed to work, and indeed no benefit in asking the question. Like grace, this is something that must simply be taken on faith.
That leap is one of the things that make “Breaking the Waves” so challenging, along with its raw sexual content and the vibrantly inventive musical language with which composer Missy Mazzoli tells the story.
Yet there’s an irresistible power at work here, exerted by both the narrative and the score in which it’s clothed. No matter how insistently your intellect may be scoffing, the emotional and even spiritual dimensions of the tale keep pulling you in.
That was true of the film, and it’s equally true of the opera, which boasts a limber libretto by Royce Vavrek and a score that is redolent at every
turn of the craggy Scottish coastline. In adapting their material, both creators have been faithful almost to a fault — the opera hits all the same expressive and dramatic marks that the movie does.
What it adds is an overt allegiance to the operatic tradition. For all its scenes of weddingnight coitus, phone sex and brief partial nudity, “Breaking the Waves” stands easily alongside the artistic models of Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Strauss.
Mazzoli writes inventively and feelingly for the voice, shaping each character with distinctive melodic contours and textural specificity. With Vavrek, she finds room for love duets, choruses, arias and so forth. She uses a dense but poignant harmonic language for both scenesetting (the orchestral music often sounds like an industrialized version of the seascapes in Britten’s “Peter Grimes”) and a dark view of the insular Calvinist society in which Bess is brought up.
The church — with its oppressive allmale leadership and grim view of sin and redemption — is what shapes Bess’ every conception of the world around her. It’s the only framework she has available for understanding the gifts of love and eros that her marriage to Jan, a Norwegian oil rigger, brings into her life. Sexual degradation, in her mind, is the path to a life lived in imitation of Christ.
There’s a lot to chew over about the sexual politics at work here, but for the moment it’s worth celebrating both the opera’s theatrical vividness and the remarkable dynamism of the West Edge production, which is conducted with firmness and fluidity by Music Director Jonathan Khuner and cannily directed by the company’s general director, Mark Streshinsky.
“Breaking the Waves” turns on the portrayal of Bess, and soprano Sara LeMesh illuminates every turn of her character with a powerhouse performance of vocal majesty and expressive translucency. The prologue, “His name is Jan,” with its ebullient vocal leaps and trembling anticipation, serves simultaneously to introduce the outsider to the community and to establish Bess’s sudden awakening to love.
Later, in her disjointed dialogues with God (who talks through Bess in gruff speech rhythms backed by an allmale chorus), LeMesh beautifully captured the stress fractures in the character’s psyche. Most importantly, she conveyed Bess’s eerily saintlike nature, without which the entire dramatic edifice would crumble.
And LeMesh was the cornerstone of a thoroughly splendid cast, all of whom rose brilliantly to their assignments. As Jan, baritone Robert Wesley Mason give a gleaming, vocally burly performance that burst with life even as he spent most of the opera confined to a hospital bed.
Mezzosoprano Kindra Scharich sang with plush immediacy as Bess’ loving sisterinlaw, Dodo, and soprano Kristin Clayton combined implacable steeliness and tonal beauty as Bess’s censorious mother. Alex Boyer’s lovely tenor lent poignancy and charm to the role of the English doctor who tends to both Jan and Bess, and there were fine contributions as well from Brandon Bell as Jan’s coworker and from Spencer Dodd as the patriarchal head of the church. The male chorus — looming, ominous, slipping in and out of Mazzoli’s sepulchral harmonies — was excellent.
“Breaking the Waves” is not an easy work to assimilate or to undertake, yet since its 2016 premiere at Opera Philadelphia it has attracted nothing but laudatory attention. Kudos are due to West Edge for bringing the piece here with such alacrity, and for presenting it so superbly. Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman