tumbling through their own sentences
by Douglas Messerli
Nico Muhly (composer), Nicholas Wright and
Winston Graham (libretto), Michael Mayer (stage director), Habib Azar (film director)
Marnie / 2018 [Metropolitan Opera
live-HD film]
I should begin this essay by admitting that I
never much liked Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie, mostly because of its hack psychological story, as retooled
from Winston Graham’s 1961 novel by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen. I have
never much liked her film-writing and doctoring, including works such as The Prime of Miss Brodie, Travels with My
Aunt, Forty Carats, Cabaret, Funny Lady and other box-office successes.
I
attended the new Metropolitan opera live-HD production yesterday, accordingly,
with some consternation and a great many doubts. Although Muhly and his
librettist Nicholas Wright immediately embraced the idea of turning Graham’s
novel into an opera, I still feel it’s a highly confused and second-rate work.
Even if we discover the heart of Marnie’s problems are quite different from the
movie, it doesn’t still quite explain her hatred of all men and her insistence
upon robbing them and turning much of her evil gain over to her detestable
mother (a bad woman through and through as even her performer Denyce Graves
admitted in an intermission interview). But, at least, in refocusing on the
novel, Muhly and Wright, along with director Michael Mayer, have given us a
much stronger and denser work, which takes the celebrity luster off both the
Tipi Hedren and Sean Connery characters, exposing their far darker natures.
Fortunately, Isabel Leonard (as Marnie) and Christopher Maltman (as
Mark) are remarkable singers who take their cues from oboe and trombone
intrusions all colored with Muhly’s lyrical explorations that occasionally
remind us of Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo,
and other Hitchcock scores, including Marnie.
That is not to say that Muhly’s score is not original. In fact, along with Wright’s libretto, Mulhy pulls the work away from the great film director’s version, taking its figures deeper into the shadows of human behavior by not only repeating the heroine’s seemingly pointless behavior, but revealing the ugly manipulation of Rutland, who, after discovering Marnie’s role as a serial thief, forces her into a marriage and who, finally in frustration, he tries to rape. The end of Act I ends violently with her attempt to slit her wrists in rejection of his advancements.
The
introduction of Mark’s rather sleazy brother, Terry (played by countertenor
Iestyn Davies), moreover, takes us into yet another dimension. This Cain-marked
man—a red patch crosses his face from birth—also allies him to the outsider if
nearly-perfect looking Marnie. As Davies recognized about his character,
although he is another detestable figure in this tale of anti-heroes, he is the
truthteller, determined to make Marnie realize who she truly is.
But, obviously—given the fact that Muhly and Wright have literally split
Marnie’s character into four other madrigal singers, dressed and with hair
coifed in a similar manner, simply wearing differently colored coats,
representing a few of her various identities—it is nearly impossible for her to
discover who she is. If Terry sees her as simply a liar, she perceives herself
primarily as a survivor, someone who is attempting to stay alive by challenging
all the dominant men (and women) in her world who tell her, time and again,
that she is not only worthless but an evil being.
Strutt, the first we see among the many Marnie has robbed, wants only
payment, presumably endless, for her having broken the illusion that she was an
extension of his ego. Others in her past creep out of the woodwork, represented
by the group of black-suited men who dance always around Marnie and her four
symbolic selves (with wonderful choreography by Lynne Page). Is it any wonder that Marnie hates men?
Relocated from Virginia and Maryland back into its original location of
the English countryside, it makes total sense for Marnie to be a horse woman
who prefers the beast to men. Her horse, Florio, she luminously sings, is the
only being she truly loves. But even here she is betrayed as, when she is
disgusted by the hounds who are attempting to rout out a vixen from her
den—surely a cornered beast with whom she can identify—she turns Florio away,
sending him on a wild race away from the hunt, which ends in his disastrous
stumble over a wall, Mark’s own fall into a hospital bed, and Marnie being
forced to take out a gun and kill the only thing she ever loved.
She
is now finally ready to continue her criminal career, stealing Mark’s keys and
breaking into his safe. Yet something has changed; she can no longer put the
easy money she discovers into her purse. Perhaps the very fact that he has
stayed by her side, even knowing the truth, has altered her perception of men.
He may have brutally used her to capture her as a bride, yet he has remained a
kind of gentleman of sorts.
The
discovery of the truth, after her mother’s death, that it was Marnie’s mother
who herself strangled her newborn, the central character of what we now realize
is a kind of study in morality in a world with little morality to offer,
beauteously thrills of her freedom at the very moment that handcuffs are placed
around her wrists. Again, unlike the film, Marnie is not “saved” or even
protected by Mark’s chauvinistic actions but must now make her own decisions of
how to salvage her life, becoming perhaps the only character who is truly free
from the ugly controls imposed upon others. If in her robberies she might have
imagined she controlled the men for whom she worked, she now perceives that
they simply ruled her behavior, and in that recognition becomes a kind of
feminist figure able now to go her own way, wherever that may lead her.
Marnie may still not be a great opera,
but it is certainly a fascinating one, where the composer and librettist rarely
permit their characters to sing out full sentences in a world that won’t
entirely allow them to speak out any true emotion or truth. Tumbling through
the mostly exuberant score, the singers come at last to a kind of peace with
their own inabilities to express the fullness of their lives. And Muhly’s opera
transcends its own somewhat pedestrian story.
Los Angeles, November 11, 2018
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2018).
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