“Opera as Opera” news: At last, after a frustrating delay since the quick sellout of the first printing, the second one is ready for shipment as of Dec. 4! Those who have pre-ordered should be receiving their copies within days of that date (at least for domestic orders), and fulfillment of new orders should be prompt. Thanks to all for your patience. P.S.: see note at the end of today’s post.

Further: I recently did an interview with host Lawrence Pugliese of Radio Free Brooklyn for its far-ranging cultural program “Troubadours and Raconteurs,” in which we discussed aspects of “Opera as Opera” and related topics. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting. After broadcast airings in several markets in the Northeast, it’s taking its eternal place as featured segment in “T & R”‘s Episode 294, reachable at www.radiofreebrooklyn.org. We’ll also be posting it on a media page soon, along with my interview with Christopher Purdy of Station WSOU (Columbus, O.) and the video of my talk, conversation with Marc Scorca, and Q & A at Opera America. We’ve been lagging slightly on this front, but will be catching up. To today’s ruminations:

As with Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angel (see the post of Dec. 12, 2017, Extermination, Salvation, Frustration), the plot-and-character conformation of Marnie owes its nebulous presence in our cultural atmosphere to the half-life of a movie by a famous director, though in this case the composer and librettist (Nico Muhly and Nicholas Wright, respectively) tell us they have worked primarily from the movie’s novelistic source, by Winston Graham. Movies are starting to take the position relative to opera occupied first by classical myth and legend, and later by plays (and, less frequently, novels) as items of cultural literacy that audiences could be depended upon to at least know about, if not know directly, and thus to establish a certain level of advance validation for the work in question. Whether or not this is a viable idea (movies, and for that matter novels, being conceived and structured along other than stage lines, and very few of them having attained the numinous weight of myth) is a larger question than I’m going to tackle today, except to repeat that in such cases, if I’m unfamiliar with the source materials beforehand, I prefer to remain so until after I’ve determined whether or not the opera works for me on its own recognizance. (I still vaguely mean to catch up with Buñuel’s Angel someday, but since I think Hitchcock a wildly overrated artist by any grown-up standard, I’ll probably not even feint in the direction of Marnie, The Movie.)

The thrice-told tale, as disclosed by the opera, goes thus: Marnie, a chic young woman who easily attracts unwanted male attention, is haunted by a repressed-memory sense that she may have killed her baby brother. She acts out her resulting “need to transgress” by stealing money from office safes in her places of employment, then moving on with a changed identity. But in the instance shown, the man who interviews her for her next change of job turns out to be the same one, a certain Mark, who had indicated some interest in her in the old one. He  recognizes her, but hires her anyway and keeps her secret until she tries to steal from his firm, whereupon he forces her into marriage as the condition of keeping quiet. After a crisis or three, including Marnie’s suicide attempt when Mark tries to consummate the marriage and the death of her beloved horse in a hunting accident (with Marnie in the saddle), she hits the office after hours and cracks the safe one more time, only to find herself constrained by nascent feelings of affection for Mark. Then, following her mother’s death, she’s told by her neighbor that it was the mother, not Marnie herself, who was responsible for the infant’s demise. As she turns herself in to the police for her serial transgressions, she declares herself free. There are other characters, incidents, and subplots, but those are the basics of the story.