Review: ‘Marnie’ Stays in the Shadows in Nico Muhly’s Opera
Image
The mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, center in yellow, portrays Marnie surrounded by shadow versions of herself in Nico Muhly’s opera, his second Met commission.CreditCreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
By Anthony Tommasini
Oct. 21, 2018
In crucial moments of an opera, despite what characters on stage may be singing about, the orchestra can signal what’s really going on and suggest subliminal emotions and disguised feelings. So the composer Nico Muhly was smart to seize on Winston Graham’s 1961 novel “Marnie,” which inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s strangely stylized 1964 film, as an intriguing subject for an opera.
This story’s baffling central character is a glamorous and troubled woman in late-1950s England, who moves from job to job, changing her look and identity, compulsively embezzling money from employers. But who is she? Why does she do it? Graham’s novel is written as Marnie’s first-person narrative. Even so, the more this Marnie seems to reveal, the less you trust her voice.
Mr. Muhly’s “Marnie,” with an effective libretto by Nicholas Wright, had its much-anticipated American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday. This is Mr. Muhly’s second Met commission. (“Two Boys” opened there in 2013.) With his keen ear for unusual harmonies and eerily alluring sonorities, Mr. Muhly painstakingly tries to use his imagination — and his proven skill at orchestration — to flesh out Marnie’s inner life.
The best scenes in “Marnie” come when Mr. Muhly, in sync with Mr. Wright, takes creative chances. Rather than providing Marnie with any sort of tell-all aria, the opera gives her short transitional “links,” as Mr. Muhly calls them, disoriented soliloquy-like passages where in broken bits of restless, leaping lines she voices bitter, confused ruminations. “What shall I be?” she sings after robbing the safe at the accounting office and deciding she must move on with a new identity. In a later link, after Mark forces a kiss upon her, she spouts disgust at his “slobbery lips,” his “flickering tongue,” in shards of phrases over a hurtling orchestra.
In the work’s most inspired touch, Marnie is trailed during key moments by four blonde women wearing single-color office dresses, called Shadow Marnies, who encircle her, providing harmonic backdrops and sometimes melodic counterpoints to her lines. Mr. Muhly, who grew up singing in church choirs, instills these fleeting scenes with hints of early sacred music over pungently subdued writing in the orchestra.
And the shadows were crucial to another compelling scene in the office of a psychoanalyst. Earlier in the opera, after Mark catches her stealing from his office safe, Marnie agrees to marry him, seeing no way out. But frustrated that she recoils at his touch, he makes a bargain: If Marnie will see an analyst he will place a horse she owns, the only thing in life she loves, in a stable for her. In this scene, over a stretch of fraught and suspenseful music, the Shadow Marnies take turns on the analyst’s couch, which proved a powerful metaphor: Don’t all people reveal multiple personalities in a therapist’s office?
Ms. Leonard brings a rich voice, a deceptively demure look and moments of poignant vulnerability to Marnie. Despite this, the extended scenes when Marnie interacts with her employers, her sullen and secretive mother (the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, back at the Met after a dozen years, and riveting), and even Mark lack dramatic definition and depth. Too many stretches of dialogue are written in a declamatory, slow-moving style that becomes ponderous.
the work’s premiere at the English National Opera.) Scenery changes are deftly rendered through sliding and descending panels on which evocative images are projected.
Mr. Muhly’s music could not have had a better advocate than the conductor Robert Spano, making an absurdly belated Met debut at 57. He highlighted intriguing details, brought out myriad colorings, kept the pacing sure and never covered the singers. Where has he been?
Whatever one’s feelings about the Hitchcock film, it was inspiring to see its star Tippi Hedren, now 88 and looking wonderful, come on stage during final ovations with the operatic Marnie at her side.
.
