Originally conceived for New York City Opera, Charles Wuorinen's idea of composing an opera on Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain was one of the projects Gerard Mortier brought with him to Madrid when he became artistic director of the Teatro Real in 2010. Mortier stepped down from his post last autumn, and is now gravely ill, but he was there to preside over the premiere of Wuorinen's score, which was staged by Ivo van Hove and conducted by Titus Engel.
Proulx volunteered for the job of turning her own short story about the doomed relationship between two Wyoming ranch hands, Jack and Ennis, into a libretto, and the opera is, she has said, much closer to her original than Ang Lee's fine film, underlining the multiple layers of the young men's tragedy and the circumscribed hopelessness of their situation. Brokeback – the Musical it most emphatically isn't, though there were a few guilty moments on the first night when I wished it might have been.
For however striking it is, Wuorinen's rather dry, often etiolated music, sometimes recalling late Schoenberg, sometimes serial Stravinsky, rarely transcends the text enough to enhance the drama rather than just adding rather terse punctuation and commentary to it. The tenebrous opening certainly signals the tragedy that is to come, but when it does, with Jack's death almost two hours later, there's nothing to deliver the gut wrench needed; Ennis's final monologue merely hints at the expressive world the music might have explored.
The generally sparse scoring at least means that a great deal of Proulx's text gets across in the performance, but that's a mixed blessing. There are far too many words: her original short story is a model of economy, but where most librettists pare down their sources, Proulx too often expands hers, adding explanations and back story, even whole scenes, that are not to be found in her original narration. Some subsidiary characters just aren't needed, and though the opera is played straight through, in two acts of 11 scenes each without an interval, the pacing is uneven and the drama sometimes holds fire just when it needs to be moving remorselessly on.
There are also copious stage directions in the libretto, and it would be charitable to think it was the effort to follow those that make Van Hove's production so self-consciously contrived. Jan Versweyveld's basic set is a white box on which video footage by Tal Yarden of the jagged, unforgiving Wyoming mountains, sometimes monochrome, sometimes in rather bleached colour, is often tellingly projected. Most of the time, though, the box is filled with naturalistic clutter – flimsy tents for the two men in the first act, whole living rooms for each of their families in the second – so that the stage looks like the showroom of a downmarket furniture store. It's the most awkward compromise between full-blooded naturalism and something much sparer and more suggestive that could have suited the tone of the opera far better.
Vocally and orchestrally, though, the performance under Engel is fine. Daniel Okulitch as Ennis and Tom Randle as Jack don't get much to work with from Wuorinen's generally declamatory vocal writing, but they do manage to create real characters. However, the relationship between them is never quite as movingly believable as it ought to be, even in Ennis's final farewell to Jack and to the life they might have had together, despite Okulitch's careful delivery. As Ennis's wife Alma, Heather Buck has the only other three-dimensional role, and manages to make something sympathetic out of it; the rest, though, are little more than ciphers, and dramatically some of them really don't need to be there at all.
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