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NYC Opera: Do "Kugelmass" Next!
Filed under: Headline Shooter Tagged: Alex Ross, Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain, fiction, John Ashbery, John McPhee, movies, music, opera, Paul Auster, poetry, Salman Rushdie, Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Woody Allen
Martin Schneider writes:
AP reports that the New York City Opera has commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera based on “Brokeback Mountain,” the short story by Annie Proulx that I believe someone made into a movie a few years back. I presume that this is the first operatic work based on material that first appeared in The New Yorker, although you never know, maybe there’s an oratorio based on John McPhee’s “Annals of the Former World.” This list of Wuorinen’s works looks fascinating—there are adaptations of work by John Ashbery, Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, and Dante, among others.
Update: Looking at that list of works, I’m not a bit surprised that Alex Ross has written about Wuorinen before.
Comments
The mind boggles at the possibilities, Martin. “The Lottery,” perhaps? Capote’s “In Cold Blood” would be too easy, as would Hersey’s “Hiroshima” (as compared to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”) — and on the fiction side, “Franny” and “Zooey” are practically arias already. No, what’s wanted (after “The Kuglemass Episode,” of course) is a version of Barthelme’s “The Indian Uprising,” say, or Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here.”