Classical Music

Most operas in the repertoire have been based on plays and novels, but occasionally composers have looked beyond the printed medium and to the silver screen for inspiration. This week English National Opera presents the British premiere of ‘Lost Highway’ – the film by David Lynch, reinvented as a modern opera by the exciting young Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth.

Her interpretation is ‘modern’ by the fact that along with singers and a 27-piece ensemble, it incorporates the live mixing of sampled and recorded electronics and video projections.

And she is not alone in taking film as a starting point for opera. In July, David Cronenberg will direct the opera ‘The Fly’, based directly on his successful 1986 film starring Jeff Goldblum. It opens at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, where Plácido Domingo will conduct. The composer is Howard Shore, who wrote the soundtrack for the movie version of that most operatic of stories ‘The Lord of the Rings’ – itself, Tolkien’s literary nod to Wagner.
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Even Dogma leader Lars von Trier is getting in on the act as his ‘Dancer in the Dark’ is to be adapted as an opera. The Royal Danish Theatre has commissioned leading local composer Poul Ruders to write the music for the work, while the libretto, in English, will be written by Henrik Engelbrecht. Swedish soprano Ylva Kihlberg is set to sing the role of Selma – played by Björk in the movie – when it opens in 2010. Ruders is also responsible for the opera ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’, which surely owes as much to Schlöndorff’s film as to Margaret Atwood’s novel.

Philip Glass wrote ‘La Belle et la Bête’, a 1994 opera based on, and accompanied by, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film. And most recently he has drawn on the life of Mahatma Ghandi for his latest opera ‘Satyagraha’ – in Sanskrit.

So it seems that opera composers have turned to a variety of disparate souces for inspiration, such as biography, history and even the news. Who would have thought President Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to visit Mao Tse-Tung would have proved fertile ground for John Adams’ 1987 opera ‘Nixon in China’? Or, more controversially, the murder of a wheelchair-bound American-Jewish man by Palestinian terrorists aboard a cruise ship would have provided the impetus for his ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’.

And it is not always the silver screen – telly has played its part, too. Damon Albarn’s ‘Monkey: Journey to the West’ (premiered in Manchester last year and which will be performed at the Royal Opera House in July) was inspired by the Japanese television series.

Going in the other direction, opera has provided a source for cinema. There have been many film versions of operas, but with singing and music intact, most hardly count as ‘film’. However, there are a number of opera-based movies. The most popular source would appear to be Bizet’s ‘Carmen’. (A notable example is Carlos Saura’s flamenco film version.)

Other movies that have taken opera as their structure include Garru Nugroho’s Indonesian ‘Opera Jawa’ and part three of Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’ series.

Perhaps the most cinematic interpretation of opera is ‘Aria’, a 1987 film in which ten directors each present a silent scene to accompany the soundtrack of ten different arias. The directors include Derek Jarman, Ken Russell, Nicholas Roeg, Jean Luc Godard and Julien Temple who, incidentally, has just finished his movie opera about the Australian graffiti artist Eternity Man.

'Lost Highway' is on at The Young Vic Theatre, Apr 4-11.