Opera composers and librettists have turned to just about any source available for their work: ancient mythology, the Bible and other sacred texts, epic poetry, folktales, drama, novels, short stories, history — both ancient and very recent — and many have created their own original plots. It’s somewhat surprising, then, that cinema, the first genuinely new narrative art form to emerge in many centuries, has taken so long to catch on as a source for new operas. Writers of musicals are far ahead of opera in mining films for their source material. The list of movie-inspired musicals is huge; a few of the most successful include A Little Night Music [based on Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night], Little Shop of Horrors, The Lion King, Spamalot [based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail], The Producers, and Hairspray.
 
 
There have been plenty of operas based on films that were based on preexisting literature, but until recently there have been few operas based on original screenplays. The film-based opera seems to be a trend that’s growing, though, and gathering momentum. The first opera derived from a film with an original screenplay was probably Giorgio Battistelli’s 1992 Teorema, based on the 1968 film by Pier Paolo Pasolini, premiered in Firenze. David Bishop’s Esperanza, based on Herbert Biberman’s black-listed 1954 labor-rights drama, Salt of the Earth, was performed in Madison, Wisconsin in 2000. In 2004, Chicago Lyric Opera produced William Bolcom’s A Wedding, based on Robert Altman’s 1978 film, with a libretto by Altman and Arnold Weinstein. The Nederlands Opera and Asko Ensemble produced Michel van der Aa’s After Life in 2006, based on the 1998 film by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Film-based operas in the works include Poul Ruders’ Dancer in the Dark (2000, Lars von Trier, for the Royal Danish Opera) and Battistelli’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006, Al Gore, for La Scala, Milan).
 
 
The operatic adaptation of a film that’s had the most widespread success is Lost Highway (2003) written by the Austrian team of composer Olga Neuwirth (on the right) and Nobel Prize winning author Elfriede Jelinek (on the left), based on David Lynch’s 1997 film, with a screenplay by the director and Barry Gifford. It received its premiere in Graz and has had productions in Basel, by the Oberlin College Conservatory (with additional performances at Columbia University), and by the English National Opera. An SACD recording of the original production, featuring Klangforum Wein, conducted by Johannes Kalitzke, was released on the Kairos label, and won a Diapason d’Or Award.

Lost Highway might seem like an odd choice for adaptation to the operatic stage. By almost any measure, the film would be categorized as a “cult classic,” one of the darkest, most disturbing, and most narratively obscure films by any major director. The subject of endless debate, the film raises questions about reality versus fantasy and offers few certainties about its meaning. It leaves the viewer wondering not only “What was that supposed to mean?,” but “What just happened?” The film involves an affluent, unhappily married California couple, Fred and Renée Madison, who receive a series of increasingly intrusive and creepy videotapes, which someone has taken inside their house while they slept. At a party, Fred meets a Mystery Man, who has the unnerving ability to be two places at once — at the party and inside the Madison’s house — simultaneously. The next day Fred receives a videotape of himself, bloodied, beside Renée’s mutilated body, but he has absolutely no recollection of it. He’s sentenced to death for her murder. One day, the prison guards discover that the man in his cell is not Fred, but a young mechanic named Pete Dayton. Pete has no idea of how he came to be in prison; he’s released, and returns to his job in a garage, but detectives follow his every move. He disastrously falls in love with Alice (a thinly disguised version of Renée), the mistress of his sinister and violent mobster client, Mr. Eddy. To escape Mr. Eddy’s wrath, Alice leads Pete on a murderous crime spree and then abandons him in the desert, where Pete is somehow transformed back into Fred Madison. Fred discovers Alice in a motel room with Mr. Eddy, kidnaps him and takes him into the desert. They fight, and Fred cuts Mr. Eddy’s throat as the Mystery Man looks on, videotaping everything. The movie ends with Fred, pursued by the police, fleeing down the desert highway.

Lost Highway trailer

 
 
Lynch’s movie is a marvel of visual and thematic leitmotifs that often obscure, rather than clarify meaning or relationships. It’s so packed with barely glimpsed images, mysterious connections, and enigmatic details (that may or may not be significant) that it demands to be seen repeatedly. Lynch has vigorously asserted that the movie can’t (and shouldn’t) be comprehended on a rational level. If it has a logic, it’s an intuitive logic that would lose its essence and mystery if it could be explained.

Since music can do its most powerful work on a subconscious level, Lost Highway makes an entirely logical choice for an opera. And based on the resulting piece, it’s clear that Neuwirth was just the composer to make it work. She succeeds because she takes the same approach to the material as Lynch does; her music doesn’t “clarify” the story, or tie plot elements together, but it operates on the same subliminal, non-rational level as the film, enriching it with yet another layer of mystery. Like the film, the music may not make sense to you, but you know that you’ve been punched in the gut.
 
 
Neuwirth has the sure dramatic instincts of a natural opera composer. She knows how to shape a scene and build tension over the course of an act, even though her musical language may be unfamiliar. She packs a full arsenal of modernist techniques and has the instincts to use them with effectiveness. She works largely in atmospheric, woozy clouds of sound, made up of bending pitches, drones, slithering glissandos, and extensive electronics, all of which create a disorienting sense of vertigo. Lynch creates a sense of mystery and extreme unease with the strangeness of his visual imagery, while Neuwirth achieves the same effect with her music. One reason the opera is so gripping is that Neuwirth’s use of sound is closely analogous to Lynch’s use of visuals.

Her use of the voice is especially compelling. Sometimes there is a consistency to her decisions; for instance, Fred and Renée only speak, while Pete and Alice sing. But there are enough irrational choices to keep the listener off balance about what exactly is going on and why. The male characters frequently veer into falsetto, and the alternation of Sprechstimme with bel canto coloratura singing is dizzyingly disconcerting. Pete’s attempted seduction of Alice before she tells him, “You’ll never have me,” is accompanied by a Monteverdi madrigal that sounds absolutely perplexing and brilliantly appropriate at the same time.
 
 
Elfriede Jelinek collaborated with Neuwirth on the libretto. One would think that with a screenplay consisting of so few words and such sparse dialogue that it would have made sense simply to set it to music as is. Jelinek’s sensibilities are as eccentric as Lynch’s (as are Neuwirth’s also, apparently), and the libretto sometimes ramps up the perversity of the screenplay. The librettists take the script and re-imagine its narrative freshly for the stage. Much of the dialogue is retained, but some details are changed, and the order of some events is shifted in light of how they would play best in a live context.

One intriguing thing about the film-opera relationship is the fact that the opera is shorter than the film by over half an hour. This is an anomaly, because generally operas are considerably longer than plays on which they are based; composers and librettists almost always cut out huge chunks of text to make for a manageable evening-length piece. Neuwirth manages to shorten the work without making the material feel compressed and perfunctory, as operas can sometimes do, when all of the text except for what is absolutely essential for carrying the narrative forward has been trimmed away. Neuwirth is able to shorten the playing time because she understands and skillfully manipulates the difference between visual and auditory experience. Lynch frequently takes considerable time creating suspense and establishing a mood by slowly accumulating images, and this accounts primarily for the film’s length, while a single aptly placed sonority may be as effective in establishing a comparable mood.

Jelinek and Neuwirth, while cutting a line here or there and omitting most of Pete Dayton’s backstory, actually add some dialogue. Their most extravagant addition also involves the only significant alteration to the narrative. They replace Mr. Eddy’s explosive road rage at a tailgating motorist with an equally violent confrontation with a customer he finds smoking in Arnie’s garage. The librettists probably made the change because car chases are notoriously difficult to pull off onstage, but their change gives the scene additional emotional weight; Mr. Eddy’s tirade and his mauling of the victim constitute the longest scene in the opera, with a total of over 50 lines, as opposed to the 15 or so in the film. It’s also the most vocally virtuosic scene in the opera and, in a way, the work’s centerpiece. Jelinek can be a brutal writer, and the scene gives her a chance to unleash the character’s savagery even more explicitly than the film does. Neuwirth’s setting of the scene is a knockout; the eccentricity and unpredictability of her music make it even more terrifying and exhausting than the film. When Mr. Eddy is done with five minutes of kicking, growling, shrieking, moaning, and howling, he turns to the horrified Pete, and sings apologetically in the most angelic falsetto, “Sorry about that Pete, but I just cant stand it when people don’t obey the rules; it’s one of the worst things I can think of.” The shocking scene is immediately followed by Mr. Eddy’s return to the garage with Alice, accompanied by a riff on the song, “This Magic Moment.” Neuwirth’s music here is dazzlingly sensual and overtly erotic. If proof were needed of Neuwirth’s absolutely sure musical and dramatic instincts, the power of these juxtaposed scenes should do it.

The film’s soundtrack was written largely by Angelo Badalamenti, one of Lynch’s favorite collaborators, and also includes songs performed by David Bowie, the German industrial metal band, Rammstein, Trent Reznor, Lou Reed, and Barry Adamson. Badalamenti’s ominous soundscapes are the perfect accompaniment to Lynch’s dark imagery, but they are so low key that they rarely draw attention to themselves. The amorphous, subliminal creepiness of his score make it clear that he has absorbed some of the same modernist techniques as Neuwirth. Neuwirth doesn’t mimic the sound of the film, but some moments, like the Badalamenti-esque treatment of Alice’s entrance mentioned above, sound like an homage to the searing cool jazz that’s the hallmark sound of much of Badalamenti’s work for Lynch.

Badalamenti: Lost Highway: Fred and Renée make love

Badalamenti: Lost Highway: Dub driving

Badalamenti: Lost Highway: Police
 
 
Lynch’s film has a surreal intensity and strangeness that limits its appeal to only the most adventurous film buff, and will probably keep it from ever having broad public acceptance. The same could be said for Neuwirth’s and Jelinek’s opera. This is not a piece that will attract fans of the standard repertoire — anyone who’s put off by Wozzeck, for instance (and even some fans of Wozzeck), may be shocked by the opera’s brutality and gruesome details. (Mr. Eddy’s extended death scene may be the most musically graphic and disturbing in any opera.) The opera works because it doesn’t try to be a reverential re-creation of the original, decorating it with music, without adding anything essentially new to it — an approach that’s the downfall of many new operas based on pre-existing sources. It amplifies the film’s eccentricities by adding a layer of music that’s as shocking and unpredictable in aural terms as the film is in visual terms. For the adventurous opera lover, with open ears and a willingness to explore a demanding level of dramatic and musical intensity, or for the fan of the film interested in experiencing it from a fresh perspective, the operatic Lost Highway can be chillingly effective.

Neuwirth: Lost Highway: Opening

Neuwirth: Lost Highway: Fred meets the Mystery Man at the party

Neuwirth: Lost Highway: Mr. Eddy’s rage

Neuwirth: Lost Highway: Alice comes to the garage with Mr. Eddy

Neuwirth: Lost Highway: Alice and Pete meet

Neuwirth: Lost Highway: Pete gets ready to rob Andy

Neuwirth: Lost Highway: Ending — Fred flees down the highway
 
 
Three short experimental films made in conjunction with the 2008 English National Opera production of Lost Highway: