Compelling Operatic Treatment of von Trier

Bess McNeill (Sara LeMesh) confronted by the congregation of her Calvinist church (courtesy of West Edge Opera)

Yesterday afternoon I made my final trip to the Bridge Yard for the conclusion of this summer’s West Edge Opera series of full-length opera production, the final performance of Breaking the Waves. Based of the 1996 film of the same name by Lars von Trier, the music was composed by Missy Mazzoli, setting a libretto by Royce Vavrek. Both composer and librettist were teenagers when von Trier’s film was released, a point that Vavrek made explicitly in his notes for the program book. Mazzoli’s notes do not indicate when she first saw the film, but it is clear that it had impacted her as much as it had Vavrek.

From his early work in 1984, von Trier was not shy when it came to provoking those who viewed his films. He could be complex, enigmatic, controversial, non-linear, and sometimes just plain illogical. With the authorship of the Dogme 95 manifesto, written with colleague Thomas Vinterberg, von Trier made it clear that filmmaking was an exercise that prioritized style over substance. Nevertheless, he never let go of substances that would get under the user’s skin and provoke from beginning to end.

The narrative of Breaking the Waves is a perfect example of von Trier’s capacity for provocation. The heroine, Bess McNeill is pretty; but it is clear that her mind is not working with a full deck. In the opera this is particularly evident when Bess sings duets with herself, one voice her own and the other that of God. A member of a strict Calvinist community, she falls in love with Jan Nyman, an atheist who works on offshore oil rigs. They marry in her church, whose congregation is suspicious of Nyman.

Not long after the wedding, there is a major accident on Nyman’s rig that leaves him totally paralyzed. In a conversation with Bess in his hospital room, Jan tells Bess that he wants her to be sexually active. Any sense of the couple’s sexual satisfaction can come only when Bess shares her descriptions of love-making with Jan. The plot then follows Bess through initial failed efforts to honor Jan’s wish, her move to the more “professional” appearance of a streetwalker, and a brutal gang rape that ultimately leads to her death. Ironically, by the end of the narrative, Jan has recovered his mobility.

Vavrek served up an impressive job of following von Trier’s narrative without either overplaying it or cutting any significant corners. Rather than trying to work with “set piece” arias and ensemble “numbers,” Mazzoli realized this libretto as a landscape of sonorities that capture the starkness of Calvinist fundamentalism, the mechanical monstrosities of an oil rig, and the raw brutish underbelly of street life. Working, for the most part, with a chamber orchestra, she draws upon an electric guitar (John Imholz) and other electronic sources to establish an auditory disquiet that is entirely consistent with the visual disquiet of von Trier’s film technique.

On the vocal side, the opera is almost entirely dominated by what Mazzoli has composed for Bess. Soprano Sara LeMesh put everything she could muster into the performance of that role. From the very beginning she made it clear that Bess was “not all there.” Her “dialogs with God” involved just the right combination of contrasting sonorities and shifts in physical bearing; and the final path to her death had the same dark inevitability that one encounters in the final scene of Alban Berg’s Lulu.

Baritone Robert Wesley Mason gave an equally solid account of Jan; but, due to the nature of the narrative, his involvement was far more limited. However, the other major vocal force came from the chorus of ten men representing the congregation of the Calvinist church. From their very first appearance, it is clear that they are setting an oppressively sinister context; and the stage direction by Mark Streshinsky made certain that those sinister qualities would consistently haunt the viewer.

My only quibble was with accents in the diction. It seemed as if Nordic diphthongs would wander in and out of the delivery of the libretto (which was written in English). Had they been more consistent, they would have been more convincing. Von Trier’s film is actually set in Scotland; but the visual set design recalled the television crime-thriller series Monster (recently released in the United States on the Starz channel), which takes place in the northernmost extremity of Norway (and also happens to involve a fundamentalist Christian sect). Nevertheless, the West Edge performance thrived on the combination of rich musical intensity in the context of minimally stark imagery. What the words were saying through the projected titles was more important than any liberties taken with pronunciation.