In order to accept this narrative, one must pointedly decline to ask all sorts of obvious questions. How does Marnie swing this, pulling off major robberies, then somehow establishing new identities (goodness—bank account? driver’s license?—those are just starters) short of Mafia-level connections and/or a Blofeld-style facial reconstruction? Were constabulary duties in the England of 1959 so unattended to? And what about this horse? Does Marnie somehow house and groom it from one identity to the next, or does she transform into owner and huntress for just this enactment? And the neighbor? She knew the ghastly truth all along, but didn’t tell anyone, let alone Marnie? To move on, let us stipulate a receptor not yet grown-up enough to notice such things, or willing to revert to that stage for the sake of being entertained. In a movie, this would involve submitting to shameless Hitchkockian flim-flam. In an opera, one would look to the music for something so enveloping, so powerfully illusionistic, that one lets go of common sense with nary a regret.

But something more would also be required, because we aren’t dealing here with a mere caper-movie script. Marnie’s malefactions notwithstanding, we are meant to invest in her, to care about whether or not she overcomes her demons, and if she does, to believe in the resolution. To some degree, we’re meant to root for Mark, too, which would require feeling his need for Marnie, or at least for marriage (he’s a widower). That, in turn, means pulling for them to become an authentic couple, and feeling a deep bittersweetness, perhaps a little Rosenkavalier-ish, at the end, as Marnie is “freed” though presumably on her way to a stiff sentence, while Mark is simply left in the dust (and, possibly, in some accessory-after-the-fact difficulty). And once again, in an opera, it’s the music that must accomplish most of this.

And that’s where I’m perplexed. As in his previous opera produced by the Met, Two Boys, Muhly weaves an elaborate orchestral fabric that’s in skittery perpetual motion, with sonorities tending toward the range extremes. Firebird flits by early on, and hints of Respighi; there are upper woodwinds-and-chimes sorties, then splats and burps in the low brass. There’s no question of the composer’s technical command, just one of what dramatic end his command is intended to serve. The vocal setting is built up out of the lower range in calculated, abstract units, a sort of musical prefab, the “line readings” sounding like purely informational exchanges that sometimes signal a nervous urgency, but are without personal content. The unpoetic, denotational libretto is part of the problem, though it never poses the obstacles to word setting of, say, Peter Sellars’ transcribed recitations in Dr. Atomic, which a summit consultation among Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner could not have solved. But the music also fails to seize what opportunities it has. There is never the sense of an unstoppable emotion or action arising from within a character and demanding a form, but rather one of predetermined forms standing in for such emotions and actions. Nor is what’s cooking inside these people present in the music. The program synopsis informs us, for instance, that late in the show,  Marnie is “fighting her growing feelings for Mark.” But I heard no feelings growing, or Marnie fighting against them. A couple of passages do threaten to break out into something more authentic: Mark’s efforts to get through to Marnie near the end of Act 1 begin to sound felt, and a scene in a psychoanalyst’s office (the one spot where the color-coded “alternate Marnies”—her other identities—have some theatrical payoff) seems set for either Freudian disclosures or dramatic resistance, without quite reaching either. But overall, the music’s feel is of craft for its own sake, of shapes and gestures as signifiers, of fashioning an abstract structure that serves as the simulacrum of an opera.