This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Given how hard composers of contemporary opera evidently find it to write music anyone might want to listen to, it’s no surprise that their judgement in the matter of words is usually pretty catastrophic as well.
Sure, “What makes a good script?” is hardly a new question. The route-one option through the ages has been to pinch something from a book or play. In the old days, composers glutted like vampires on Schiller, Victor Hugo, Walter Scott and their more lurid epigones, where you could count on a preposterous melodrama with bountiful opportunities for the dram pers to wail their little hearts out in aria form.
Well, now the theatre’s almost as clapped-out as opera itself, so only a madman would go poking around there for something to “introduce to a narrower audience”, as we jestingly say of the opera public. These days, composers tend to turn to the flicks — and this month’s headline is that Mark-Anthony Turnage, the punchy Essex lad, has revised his decision to retire from opera (following a mildly entertaining squabble with critics after we dumped all over his last go, the pointless Coraline), and his new one, Festen, opens at Covent Garden on 11 February.
For most people, Turnage’s best opera was his ’88 debut Greek, a raucous Oedipus set in the East End. The equally fraught Danish family of Festen (you remember: bad lighting, shaky cameras, the whole Dogme 95 grab-bag emptied onto a merry tale of Scando pervs at a birthday bash) might reawaken some of the witty, pungent genius of that score.
Gotta say, though, most attempts to transmute screen hits have had sub-alchemical results. Simply listing them makes you shudder: Lost Highway (Olga Neuwirth, 2007), Marnie (Nico Muhly, 2017), Breaking the Waves (Missy Mazzoli, 2016), The Exterminating Angel (Thomas Adès, 2016) …
Funny, isn’t it, how they don’t choose the sort of sensible scripts you or I would, like Ghostbusters or Bridget Jones’s Diary. By comparison, the daddy of the lot, Gerald Barry’s insane mangling of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (2005), now looks like a deathless masterpiece, though nearly everyone hated it at the time.
Imagine John Philip Sousa as the Incredible Hulk and you get the picture
At least Barry tried something original. Fassbinder’s 1972 film is a talky number about a ghastly 36-year-old fashionista’s screwed-up lesbian relationship with a slummocky young model no less frightful and exploitative than herself — based on one of Fassbinder’s own many self-hating, mutually-assured-destruction gay liaisons, gender-reassigned to permit extra lashings of misogyny.
Barry adorned this story of sotto voce spite with an endless “Nazi girls’ march” of deafening, discordant brass trooping up and down the scale — imagine John Philip Sousa as the Incredible Hulk and you get the picture. It was all quite fun, for a while anyway.
Most adaptations have really been pale imitations weighed down with charmless music, whereas to make a decent impact you surely (like Barry) need to do something so vastly different to the film it has a chance of establishing its own identity. Interestingly, unlike opera, musicals have managed the trick: see Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, lifted from the Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night.
An altogether jollier area is the fruitful little field of operas that became proper movies (not merely boring filmed-performance ones). Standouts here are Bergman’s enchanting Magic Flute (1975), Carmen Jones of 1954, directed by Otto Preminger, and Michael Powell’s hallucinatory Bluebeard’s Castle (1963).
And a few outliers: Max Ophüls’s 1932 reframing of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride — his first big feature, and a last hurrah for Weimar cinema — where pre-war rural Germany springs to remarkable life (and you also get Max Schreck, the original Nosferatu, as a Red Indian chief in a travelling circus).
For a proper bloody slice of multi-layered angst, check out the freaky 1989 Boris Godunov directed by Andrzej Zulawski — a freewheeling festival of nudity and brutality, dripping with delirious Russophobia. Produced in a high-tab heavy-metal aesthetic, things are immeasurably improved by having Boris, played by Ruggiero Raimondi, mainlining a massive Lemmy vibe.
Everyone now pretends to adore the Powell & Pressburger Tales of Hoffmann, though it’s a bit rich for any non-deranged tastes, a stratospheric-camp phantasmagoria that (like many of these films) is a kind of multi-orgasmic payday for its designer (Hein Heckroth, who also produced that Bluebeard).
That’s the thing: with its miraculous visual potential, cinema is clearly the place for opera to get its gladdest rags on. With genuine actors miming to a pre-recorded soundtrack, the old “yawning hippo” aspect of singers can be a thing of the past. Given the grim, cheapskate stagings we usually get, what better way for opera to come flouncing out of its closet into a brave new future?
