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Nov. 6th, 2018 08:07 amMarnie by Nico Muhly, based on the novel by Winston Graham
The novel was famously adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, but neither![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
freeradical42 nor I had seen the film. This is Muhly's third opera; I have written about seeing the other two before. That is, of course, not counting the fictional opera "Amy Fisher" which he composed within the show Mozart in the Jungle, and which would I would definitely request fic for if Invisible Ficathon ever returns.
I think my tentative ranking is 1. Dark Sisters, 2. Marnie, 3. Two Boys. I liked Marnie, and I liked a lot of what Muhly did musically, but there were a few marring infelicities that jarred you, like the inclusion of expositional language in the libretto. And there were some confusing elements in the staging that I didn't entirely mind as they happened, but which didn't resolve as cleanly as I'd hoped.
Marnie is the story of a con-woman in 1950s small-town England, who travels from place to place getting a job as a trusted office worker and then steals from the company and flees town in the night. This is not entirely a happy life for her, but it is comfortably rootless, and she is afraid of roots, afraid of the ties of family and friendship. Probably in part because of some childhood trauma, and probably in part because of a rootless genetic inheritance, the story implies.
In the first act, she gets caught stealing by her widower boss and blackmailed into an unhappy marriage. This does not end up well for her: this is an opera, after all. She is pursued by mysterious men from her past at all sides, and in the second act, which eschews Hitchcockian plot twists more than we'd expected, her past catches up on her from all sides, assaulting her and forcing her towards a powerful reckoning.freeradical42 pointed out a strikingly paradoxical mirroring between the act finales: In the Act I finale, she is as trapped and restricted as ever, as she opens up her wrists. In the Act II finale, she declares her sense of freedom, as the police place manacles on her wrists.
Muhly's music was sort of post-Glassian... a lot of moody minimalism, but also some more deliberate programmatic music when it was called for. The opening scene, set in an office and full of voices talking over each other and multiple conversations at once, with a libretto full of well-articulated connective assonances, was particularly striking and effective. There was a tendency at times for the orchestration to sometimes be a little too unobtrusive, to disappear into the background and let the singer's melodic line dominate. But on the whole I really enjoyed Muhly's take on Marnie, and I plan to watch the film soon to compare.
The novel was famously adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, but neither
freeradical42 nor I had seen the film. This is Muhly's third opera; I have written about seeing the other two before. That is, of course, not counting the fictional opera "Amy Fisher" which he composed within the show Mozart in the Jungle, and which would I would definitely request fic for if Invisible Ficathon ever returns. I think my tentative ranking is 1. Dark Sisters, 2. Marnie, 3. Two Boys. I liked Marnie, and I liked a lot of what Muhly did musically, but there were a few marring infelicities that jarred you, like the inclusion of expositional language in the libretto. And there were some confusing elements in the staging that I didn't entirely mind as they happened, but which didn't resolve as cleanly as I'd hoped.
Marnie is the story of a con-woman in 1950s small-town England, who travels from place to place getting a job as a trusted office worker and then steals from the company and flees town in the night. This is not entirely a happy life for her, but it is comfortably rootless, and she is afraid of roots, afraid of the ties of family and friendship. Probably in part because of some childhood trauma, and probably in part because of a rootless genetic inheritance, the story implies.
In the first act, she gets caught stealing by her widower boss and blackmailed into an unhappy marriage. This does not end up well for her: this is an opera, after all. She is pursued by mysterious men from her past at all sides, and in the second act, which eschews Hitchcockian plot twists more than we'd expected, her past catches up on her from all sides, assaulting her and forcing her towards a powerful reckoning.
freeradical42 pointed out a strikingly paradoxical mirroring between the act finales: In the Act I finale, she is as trapped and restricted as ever, as she opens up her wrists. In the Act II finale, she declares her sense of freedom, as the police place manacles on her wrists. Muhly's music was sort of post-Glassian... a lot of moody minimalism, but also some more deliberate programmatic music when it was called for. The opening scene, set in an office and full of voices talking over each other and multiple conversations at once, with a libretto full of well-articulated connective assonances, was particularly striking and effective. There was a tendency at times for the orchestration to sometimes be a little too unobtrusive, to disappear into the background and let the singer's melodic line dominate. But on the whole I really enjoyed Muhly's take on Marnie, and I plan to watch the film soon to compare.