The short story that inspired Heath and Jake’s Oscar-winning man-on-man love story Brokeback Mountain has been adapted into an opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Charles Wuorinen, set to open in Madrid next week.
Director Ivo Van Hove insists that the opera is not an adaptation of the 2005 film (one of the few that Margaret and David could come to a unanimously positive agreement on), but rather of the Annie Proulx short story which inspired the film. Hove hopes that, although LGBT rights have advanced in leaps and bounds since Proulx first published the story in 1997, the story still finds some influence in a world where homophobia and sexual discrimination are still prevalent, even in liberal countries: “I live and work in Amsterdam. Over the last few years more and more gay people have been beaten up in the streets. It’s not only in Russia, it’s not only in India. It’s still happening also in countries that are very open about it.”
Wuorinen, who wrote the score alongside Proulx herself writing the Libretto (that’s the original Italian word for the words used in an opera, duh. You pleb) compared the story’s focus on same-sex love to older operas featuring “an illegitimate child or difference of social classes”, and described it as “a contemporary version of the same eternal problem.”
Via The Guardian
