AN OPERA based on a film set in Scotland is to have its European premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF).
Breaking The Waves is a “dark and daring” opera based on Lars von Trier’s 1996 film by American composer Missy Mazzoli and Canadian librettist Royce Vavrek.
Following its 2016 premiere at Opera Philadelphia, Breaking The Waves went on to win the 2017 Best New Opera from the Music Critics Association of North America and was shortlisted for an International Opera Award.
Tony Award winner Tom Morris will direct its European premiere at EIF, which is co-presented by Opera Ventures and Scottish Opera. In the new production, American soprano Sydney Mancasola stars as Bess McNeill, a young woman living in a religious community on a remote Scottish coast. Edinburgh-born baritone Duncan Rock is her husband Jan Nyman, a Norwegian rig worker.
Just as controversial as when it won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1996, the story continues to divide audiences, like all of the great Dane’s work.
There’s a convincing argument Bess’s submissive, self-sacrificing, character is sexist cliche.
Originally performed by Emily Watson, she defers first to the community’s religious patriarchs and, after marriage, to her husband. Her acts are in ultimate deference to God, His will revealed in the Bible.
Von Trier counts the film as the first in his Golden Heart trilogy, a gut-mangling series of films where the central female character maintains her “golden heart” despite being brutalised by the world.
Bess is nevertheless an appropriate character for opera, a tragic heroine at the centre of an overwrought moral drama.
Vavrek has long wanted to adapt the film, after first seeing it as a young teenager. “I was completely boggled and very arrested by the experience,” Vavrek says. “I think the best art encourages us to be empathetic, and it requires such empathy of its viewers. I couldn’t believe Emily Watson could give such a committed, full-blooded performance like that.
“I’ve been obsessed by this movie and have been carrying it for many, many years and it was something I knew I had to be in deeper dialogue with.”
Vavrek refers to an essay Von Trier wrote in which the director states that Bess and Jan are acting from a “place of goodness”.
“I’ve always been interested in his ideas on sexuality and the Bible,” Vavrek says. “Bess believes marriage is a covenant that’s unbreakable, that she and Jan are tethered together for eternity. Though it’s ambiguous as to why Jan is asking her to do these things, I do believe it’s from a place of good intentions, of trying to set her free.”
Vavrek and Mazzoli’s opera is informed by a research trip to Scotland in 2014 when the duo visited Edinburgh, Glasgow and Skye.
“When Missy first saw the Scottish landscape she said to me: ‘I know how it has to start’,” Vavrek says. “The lush greenness and the dramatic violence of the cliffs and the rocks really bled into the score and affected it in a major major way.”
Vavrek asked people they met to read parts of his libretto, including the landlady of their Skye boarding house.
“She’s lived on Skye her entire life and her family all had maritime professions,” he says. “One of the first lyrics is: ‘husbands out to sea, husbands on the rig, we must learn to endure’. Hearing her breathe into these texts with such resonance was very special, it was almost an emotional dramaturgy. I will remember that for ever.”
August 21 to 24 (not 22), King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, 7.15pm, £15 to £35. Tel: 0131 473 2000.
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