Brokeback Mountain by Charles Wuorinen (review)

This quarterly column presents content formerly covered separately in the Digital Media Reviews and Video Reviews columns. Reviews will cover all genres of music in all video formats, World Wide Web sites, online subscription services and databases, software, apps, digital humanities projects, and other emerging formats for the transmission of music and music scholarship. Ed. note: We would like to acknowledge Leslie Andersen, former editor of the Video Reviews column, for her assistance in editing the review that follows.

Charles Wuorinen’s Brokeback Mountain differs markedly from director Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning 2005 film of the same name. When the opera premiered at the Teatro Real of Madrid in January 2014, audiences and critics questioned whether Wuorinen, an uncompromising post-serialist composer, and first-time librettist Annie Proulx, author of the original 1997 short story, would create an opera with the same dramatic and emotional intensity. Whereas the film suggests the beauty of the short story’s narrative prose through warm cinematography and sentimental orchestral underscoring, the opera emphasizes the fraught nature of the central romance between cowboys Ennis Del Mar and Jack Trist via Wuorinen’s acerbic, yet expressive musical pallet and director Ivo van Hove’s minimalist stage aesthetic.

Brokeback Mountain unfolds steadily over the course of twenty-two scenes that are divided evenly between two continuous acts. Framed by a panoramic video background of the Wyoming landscape that gradually blossoms into color, in the first act Ennis (sung by bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch) and Jack (tenor Tom Randle) find unexpected intimacy within the lonely, sparse environment. The menace posed by the mountain, expressed by an ominous, low-C pedal tone played by basses and timpani, recurs as the story moves forward through two decades. In adapting her story to the stage, Proulx adds episodes that flesh out the story’s supporting characters, especially Ennis’s wife, Alma (soprano Heather Buck) and Jack’s wife, Lureen (mezzo-soprano Hannah Esther Minutillo). In a nod to operatic tradition, the second act features a ghost scene in which Lureen’s deceased father suggests to her the nature of Jack’s extramarital affairs. Much of Proulx’s narrative prose from the original story finds its way into the sung dialogue, adding some poetic touches to the straightforward, American slang. Otherwise, the opera follows the story’s outline, ending with Ennis alone, mourning Jack’s death.

Although devoid of lyricism that might have invested the opera with higher emotional stakes, Wuorinen’s declamatory text-setting is eminently comprehensible. Moments of musical beauty are fleeting, never lingering long enough to allow listeners to settle comfortably into the sonic terrain, in the same way that Jack and Ennis’s periodic meetings are always transitory. The dearth of identifiable motives precludes a sense of large-scale development, but, in what is perhaps Wuorinen’s most satisfying approach to characterization, Ennis moves from Sprechstimme to something approaching lyricism over the course of the opera.

Despite the difficulty of the compositional language, the performers are uniformly excellent. Okulitch gives a particularly committed, dramatic performance. The premiere Madrid production is vividly captured in Bel Air Classiques’s Blu-Ray recording. The orchestra under Titus Engel aptly realizes Wuorinen’s flashes of orchestral color, which translate clearly through the recording. The disc offers English, Spanish, and French subtitles, with stereo or 5.1 surround sound. A twenty-minute compilation of interviews with commissioning impresario Gerard Mortier, Wuorinen, Proulx, and Engel provide some insight into the creative team’s decisions in adapting the story for the operatic stage, as well as the opera’s relationship to the film. Given the opera’s unremitting dissonance and the general preference of American audiences for canonic repertoire and tonal harmony, it seems unlikely that Brokeback Mountain will receive a warm welcome from U.S. opera companies, which makes this video release an important document, a testament to the continuing diversity of musical language.