Marnie, Metropolitan Opera, New York — sensitive, smart and fatally flawed

Marnie, Nico Muhly’s third opera, was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera but co-produced by the Met and English National Opera, where it was first seen late last year. It may seem odd for the Met to cede the premiere to London, yet it’s become a pattern. From the Met’s point of view, London serves as an out-of-town tryout, as on Broadway of yore. When such a co-production reaches the Met, it has presumably been felicitously revised and recast.

So it was with Marnie, which had its Met premiere on Friday night. There was an entirely new cast and conductor, and Muhly and his librettist, Nicholas Wright, and his producer, Michael Mayer, had cut a little and added a little; in came a whole new aria, out went the penultimate one. But while I didn’t see the London version, the result seemed entirely in sync with the London response, which mostly ranged from reserved to negative.

It is always dangerous to compare a work of art with its antecedents, in this case Winston Graham’s novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s film. This opera has to stand on its own two feet. Wright’s libretto seems sensitive and smart. Each version offers plausible variations on the plot and the characters. The enigmatic, identity-shifting central figure remains memorable. But a novel can offer more detail than a film and a film more than an opera, so there has been a progressive devolution of complexity and ambiguity.

Muhly’s music has one fatal flaw: a lack of memorable vocal melody. Solo vocal, that is; the choral passages are more telling, and the orchestral textures, reminiscent of John Adams, can sound piquant. But when Muhly stops for a big aria, what he offers simply does not rise to the occasion.

Still, this Marnie holds one’s attention. Mayer’s dramatic conception is captivating, with its multiple shadow Marnies and feral packs of grey-suited men, plus clever sets and projections from Julian Crouch and 39 Productions and spiffy 1950s costumes from Arianne Phillips.

The new cast is strong, too. Robert Spano is a sure conductor, even with what sounded like a piccolo glitch at the very end. Isabel Leonard exudes glamour as Marnie, although her light mezzo lacks the ideal bite for the part. Christopher Maltman makes a solid Mark Rutland, Denyce Graves is scary as Marnie’s mother, Janis Kelly projects Mark’s mother authoritatively, Iestyn Davies has mastered the odd countertenor role of Mark’s brother Terry (the one character more complex in Wright than in the earlier iterations), with Anthony Dean Griffey imposing as Marnie’s chief pursuer and Gabriel Gurevich as a sweet Little Boy. They all hold up their ends, but Muhly’s vocal writing does not.

★★★☆☆

To November 10, metopera.org