Wuthering Heights, Minnesota Opera

Artful anguish: Sara Jakubiak

Like Sir Arthur Sullivan, who with his opera of serious presumption Ivanhoe sought out a higher aesthetic plane than operetta afforded, the great film composer Bernard Herrmann wrote Wuthering Heights. Herrmann’s career, which included epochal scores for Hitchcock, opened doors for producing his only opera, completed in 1951, but they were inevitably shut because of his irascible personality and refusal to allow cuts or alterations. This production by the Minnesota Opera, an intrepid company that offers a new or out-of-the-way work every season, is the first staging since the opera’s posthumous premiere by the Portland Opera in 1982.

Wuthering Heights, which has a libretto by Herrmann’s first wife Lucille Fletcher, who may have furnished Herrmann with the text of the fictitious opera in Citizen Kane, is sometimes clumsy as it traverses the first half of Emily Brontë’s novel, ending like other adaptations after the death of Cathy. There are enough moments when music and drama come into Hitchcock-like sharpness to make one wish it were all like that. But perfunctoriness often infects scenes that seem more dutifully composed than inspired. Heathcliff is portrayed sympathetically, a victim of Cathy’s mean-spirited brother Hindley, with no inherent diabolical streak. But perhaps this is acceptable operatic simplification, designed to strengthen the love-bond between him and Cathy.

Herrmann knew something about creating music keenly matched to drama, and his lush, late-Romantic musical palate engages the listener. Several short motifs run through the score. Aria-like numbers, though rarely captivating melodically, affectingly spell well-crafted expository stretches. I left wondering whether on subsequent listening, certain scenes would emerge in sharper relief.

Eric Simonson’s staging, with sets by Neil Patel and costumes by Jane Greenwood, evokes both the fraught ambience of the Heights and the forbidding moors surrounding it. Sara Jakubiak’s bright soprano and clear diction make for a captivating Cathy, a demanding role with two extended scenes in which she anguishes over Heathcliff, who is sung by baritone Lee Poulis in virile voice. Adriana Zabala boils over in frustration as Heathcliff’s eventual wife Isabella, while Michael Christie ably conducts a slimmed down version of the score.

The sad thing is not that Herrmann failed to get Wuthering Heights produced but that he exalted it over his cinematic work. Happily, history has a way of redressing the balance in such matters.

Minnesota Opera