Cowboy romance shifts from short story to stage
MADRID — When the news came five years ago that Charles Wuorinen was writing an opera based on Brokeback Mountain, the 1997 Annie Proulx short story that was made into an Oscar-winning film in 2005, it seemed at first a baffling mismatch of composer and subject. Wuorinen, 75, built his reputation as and remains an unabashedly complex modernist. Brokeback Mountain is the immensely sad tale of the impossible love between two Wyoming cowboys.
But over time, the idea of a Wuorinen adaptation of Brokeback Mountain grew more intriguing. One certainly did not want some sentimental score for this wrenching tragedy set in the rugged American West. The project seemed more promising still when it was announced that Proulx would be writing the libretto, her first effort in this genre.
The première of Brokeback Mountain, one of the most anticipated events of the international opera season, took place at the Teatro Real in Madrid Tuesday night. It is a serious work, an impressive achievement. But it is a hard opera to love.
Wuorinen has written an intricate, vibrantly orchestrated and often brilliant score that conveys the oppressiveness of the forces that defeat these two men, whose lives we follow over 20 years, starting in 1963, when they take a summer job herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain. But the same qualities in Wuorinen’s music that can captivate listeners — ingenious complexity, lucid textures, tartly atonal harmonic writing — too often weigh down the drama in this work.
To his credit, there is not one saccharine or melodramatic touch in the score. For long stretches, though, Wuorinen’s music comes across as a little too brainy and busy.
The cast, to a member, embraces every chance to maximize every lyrical bit in the vocal writing. The rich-voiced bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch gives his all to the role of Ennis. The tenor Tom Randle brings a youthful voice and eager manner to Jack. Wiry and needy, this Jack knows what he wants and never stops asking for it, though he cannot get Ennis to make the same leap.
The final scene hints at what this work might have been.
Jack is dead. Ennis, now alone, clutches two old shirts, his and Jack’s, bloodied from a fight they had during their last night that first summer, shirts Jack kept, in secret, for 20 years. Ennis sings an emotional soliloquy. You cannot imagine the Ennis of the short story, or the film, voicing the thoughts he sings here, like “It was only you in my life, and it will always be only you.” But this is opera, and while not diluting his harmonic language, Wuorinen gives Ennis an extended passage of disarming lyrical elegance. If only there had been more such passages.