I don't know if you remember what a huge cultural thing Brokeback Mountain the movie was when it was released in 2005. Suddenly, absolutely EVERYONE was using "brokeback" to mean "gay stuff." This includes committed homophobes, of course, but also people would wouldn't have thought of themselves that way at all but who nonetheless were uncomfortable with gayness on some level and were using it in a sort of nervous, desperate way. The concept of "Brokeback Mountain: The Opera" would've been exactly the sort of quasi-joke you would've expected from Family Guy or whatever bottom-feeding Adult Swim cartoon. It was weird times, man. Of course, by 2014 this was well and truly over--Brokeback Mountain feels like a movie very of its time; one might well question the need for an opera nine years later. And yet, here we have it.
It felt like there was some sort of cultural obligation to see the movie back in the day. I distinctly remember standing in a video rental place (yes! those existed!) mentally debating whether to rent it, but somehow I never did. Things that feel like obligations are never things you really want to do. But hey, now I've seen this version, so...vindication?
Well, you probably know the story, or at least the first part of this story: two ranchers, Jack and Ennis, get summer jobs herding sheep on the titular mountain. This is 1963. When they drunkenly hook up one night, it leads to a years-long occasional relationship. They both get married and have kids. Ennis gets divorced. At their last meeting, in 1983, they have a fight, and months later Jack is killed in an auto accident. Ennis declares that there will never be anyone but Jack. And that's it. If there are differences between this and the movie or original short story, well, that's still the plot of the opera.
So...okay, the story is moving and tragic kind of, but it also has pretty significant issues, I have to say. Firstly, just killing Jack off like that feels like a massive cop-out. There's some vague effort made to connect the death to a homophobic murder that had taken place in Ennis' youth, but it's pretty half-baked (and to the extent that that IS meant to be what happened, I don't find "eh, homophobes probably killed him" overly compelling either). This is part of why I'm not interested in Game of Thrones: it's just not interesting for characters to be arbitrarily killed off. A little nihilism goes a very, very long way. Not that I'm saying this is nihilistic, exactly, but in the end I'm just left thinking: welp. The pathos feels unearned.
Then there's the matter of Ennis' and Jack's respective wives, Alma and Lureen. These two need to either have much bigger or much smaller roles. As it is, they're just big enough that you expect them to play more or a part in the proceedings, such that it feels weird when they don't. Although, there is one extremely weird scene with Lureen: she's lamenting that her late father was right, she never should have married him, and then he appears and says, I'm your dad. I'll help you as far as I can. Stay tuned, and this is never alluded to again, but: is the narrative implying that Jack is eventually murdered by his father-in-law's ghost? Seriously, double-you tee eff? What kind of story IS this, anyway?
And then, just in general, the writing is extremely unsubtle, forcing the words to carry a burden that really should be held up by the music. And the, I guess, central metaphor of the mountain is...seriously, it's NOTHING. The opera opens with the ranch boss that Jack and Ennis are working for singing about how, like, bad the mountain is and how it drives men MAD and whatnot, but this is just not reflected in the actual story we see. The libretto was written by Annie Proulx herself, and she did a BAD JOB. Whether that's because the original story is bad or because she lacked experience writing libretti, I couldn't say. But there you have it.
Well yes BUT, this is an opera, dammit, so how about the MUSIC? Well...probably I spent so much time wittering on about the story because there's not that much to SAY about the music. Sort of clanking and atonal. It does at times evince a certain stark, ominous quality that seems appropriate to the story, but like so many contemporary operas, it's mostly just...there to carry the story along, it feels like. Nothing you'd be likely to just listen to, no real stand-out moments. And man, you contemporary composers have GOTTA learn to put actual ARIAS in your work. You can't all be Wagners. Though actually that may be a blessing, I suppose. But STILL.
I will give it one thing: I always grew up pronouncing "coyote" as "kye-ote," whereas I know most people pronounce it in the Warner Bros way, and I had sort of accepted that my way was probably idiosyncratic and wrong, to the extent that there IS a right and wrong here, but here, they do it my way every time. Vindicated! So that's pretty great. But that aside...I mean, this isn't a horrible piece of work or anything, and all the singers here give it their best, but I cannot help feeling that it's the very definition of inessential.
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