Wuthering Heights the Opera, guest blog by Diane in MN

 

Bernard Herrmann was a well-known and highly-regarded composer of film scores, from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver. He's probably most famous for his work with Alfred Hitchcock; Herrmann wrote the scores for North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Psycho. But he also wrote an opera, Wuthering Heights, and the Minnesota Opera presented it in April.

Herrmann was working on the Orson Welles film of Jane Eyre in the early 1940s, and that may have been when he started to think about writing an opera based on Wuthering Heights. His then wife, Lucille Fletcher, wrote the libretto after the Herrmanns visited Yorkshire in 1946, and Herrmann completed the score in 1951. It was never produced during Herrmann's lifetime, possibly because of its length (Herrmann refused to allow any cuts), or possibly because Herrmann wanted more control over a production than any interested opera company was willing to concede. The work was premiered in Portland in 1982. The MN Opera production was its first staged revival.

There was a discussion on the forum some time ago that boiled down to: Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights? I plumped for Jane Eyre and freely admit that I don't like Wuthering Heights the novel. That being said, I did like Wuthering Heights the opera, with some reservations. I like Herrmann's movie scores, for one thing, and even though I find Heathcliff and Cathy, never mind the rest of the characters, to be deeply unsympathetic, opera plots are full of unsympathetic characters, so that's not a deal-breaker. Also, the libretto confines itself to the first half of the book, so the opera can focus on the main characters even though the plot resists a tight dramatic structure. And then, of course, there's the fit between the music and the libretto that pulls everything together.

Wuthering Heights is written in a prologue and four acts, and Herrmann bridges the acts with orchestral interludes that—what? suggest? describe? reflect?—what's happening in nature as the action takes place. Given that Heathcliff and especially Cathy are so identified (and at least in Cathy's case, self-identified) with nature, Herrmann's interludes provide both a physical and a psychological background for the opera's events, and supplement the sung text. I don't know what, if anything, Herrmann might have had in mind for the stage while the orchestra was playing. Projections of the Yorkshire landscape at different seasons accompanied the interludes in the MN Opera production, and I think this would have made sense to Herrmann the film composer, who made a career of writing evocative music for a primarily visual medium. This treatment was certainly effective in setting the mood for each scene.

Of course, the music written for the singers is the essential part of an opera. MN Opera's program notes assert that Herrmann was "not a melodist," and go on to say that the "voices sing in a declamatory parlando style, while the orchestra truly tells the story". I wouldn't agree that the orchestra has pride of place here, despite Herrmann's success in using it to create atmosphere. Herrmann interspersed arias with the sung dialogue, and two of Cathy's, "I have been wandering," (her opening aria, a setting of a poem by Emily Bronte), and "I have dreamt" (from Act II, a brief moment of self-knowledge before she turns away to marry Edgar Linton), are very good and have stayed with me since I heard them. Most of the arias are indeed conversational, but both Edgar and Isabella Linton are given songs, largely due I think to the demands of the plot, but perhaps also because their world is less natural and more artificial— civilized, in fact—than the world of Wuthering Heights. The music is romantic in a mid-twentieth-century style, and doesn't make excessive demands of its audience. (I don't say this in a damns-with-faint-praise spirit, but to contrast the score with the sort of mid-twentieth-century atonal modernism that I personally would find hard to take for three-plus hours.)

The reservations I have about Wuthering Heights relate to the question of how it works as a stage piece. The events in the opera take place over several years, and while the passage of time from one scene to another is sometimes clear—Cathy Earnshaw in the kitchen at Wuthering Heights is next seen as Catherine Linton in the drawing-room at Thrushcross Grange—at other times, it's not. On the whole, I think the librettist did a good job with a difficult source, but if the audience needs to know that six months or three years have passed, they should be able to get that information from the characters, not from seeing "Three years later …" projected on a curtain before the next scene. To me, this distances the audience from the action, when opera should be about immediacy.

Also, while I was somewhat amused to learn that a Mexican miniseries based on Wuthering Heights was called Abismos de pasion (and the book certainly contains more than enough melodrama for an operatic plot), the abysms of passion weren't always plumbed on the stage. In part, this may have been due to the production's director, since the singers tended to sing to the audience rather than to each other, but it may also have to do with the librettist and composer working within the constraints of the novel. Don Jose and Carmen might plausibly (if uncomfortably) sing a duet while rolling around on the floor of a tavern, but the passions of the characters in Wuthering Heights have less opportunity for physical expression. There is a Bernard Herrmann Society, and a few of its members that saw the MN Opera production thought that there was simply a lack of chemistry between the principal singers. It would be interesting to see another production, with different singers and a different director, and compare the effects.

Some very brief excerpts from the Minnesota Opera production, highlighting arias sung by several characters, are on the Minnesota Opera website at www.mnopera.org/watchlisten.

A selection of three different arias, including Cathy's "I have wandered," is on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nV5DytV-2g&feature=related.

And another version of "I have dreamt," sung in recital by a mezzo-soprano, is also on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJaxm0VeyMQ&NR=1.

(I like this performance better than the soprano's in the Minnesota production.)

 Have a listen, and see what you think. And for anyone really interested, one of the Minnesota performances was filmed for HD presentation sometime in the future. A recorded performance will probably be featured on Minnesota Public Radio next year, and if so could be heard on the MPR classical music web site.