Ever since she was 13, when she first saw "The Elephant
Man," Olga Neuwirth, a 35-year-old Austrian composer, has
felt an affinity with the filmmaker David Lynch. "In his
films, you are put into a vortex without actually knowing
what is going on," Ms. Neuwirth said recently from Venice,
where she lives. "So this has always been a part of my
thinking."
The appeal of the vortex - not to mention the labyrinth,
which partly explains her move from Vienna to the mazelike
Venice 10 years ago - has been an essential part of Ms.
Neuwirth's compositional process.
"How can you draw people in, making it impossible for them
to escape from listening?" she asked. "It's so hard in our
times to listen. But I never want to make music very clear.
It must always be a riddle. There is never a theme you can
easily latch onto. A different kind of psychology is
happening, one of not knowing what is going on. That's why
I'm so close to Lynch."
And that is why Ms. Neuwirth (pronounced NOY-veert) has
dared to turn Mr. Lynch's most enigmatic film, "Lost
Highway," into an opera. Ms. Neuwirth's "Lost Highway,"
which just had its premiere in Graz, her hometown (and much
to her horror, Arnold Schwarzenegger's), runs through Nov.
8 at the Helmut List Hall.
When the movie came out in 1997, it baffled both audiences
and critics. At first glance, it seemed two different
movies, surrealistically spliced together via head-on
collision.
The first half concerns a jazz saxophonist, Fred Madison
(played by Bill Pullman), who is tormented by suspicions
that his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), is unfaithful.
Videotapes left anonymously on their doorstep start off as
creepy surveillance of their home's exterior, then,
alarmingly, show the troubled couple asleep in their
bedroom. The last tape received shows Fred butchering his
wife, and he is arrested and imprisoned.
The second half of the film concerns a young mechanic,
Peter Dayton (Balthazar Getty), who is released from Fred's
cell - Fred, meanwhile, having vanished into thin air. Pete
falls head over heels for a blonde, Alice Wakefield, who is
the moll of an underworld pornographer, "Mr. Eddy." When
their affair shifts into high gear, Alice persuades Pete to
commit a robbery with her, then coldly dumps him. Pete
transforms into Fred and kills Mr. Eddy. The film
hauntingly loops back to the beginning.
The only hint the tight-lipped Mr. Lynch dropped about the
meaning of "Lost Highway" was "psychogenic fugue." The
term, with its musical overtones, refers to the
dissociative disorder in which a person forgets who he or
she is, takes on another identity and creates a new life
somewhere else. During the "fugue" - or flight from the
former self - amnesia erases the past life.
In other words, Fred Madison commits a horrific crime, and
his mind opts for the ultimate form of denial: becoming a
different person with no memory, Peter Dayton. The twist is
that he hasn't really escaped at all. Although his exterior
appearance has changed, he falls again for the same woman
(Renee and Alice are both played by Ms. Arquette), who
ultimately rejects him.
"This is the horrible thing," Ms. Neuwirth said. "You
remain a prisoner of your body and mind. You can't escape
from yourself, your fears, your inner life."
"Lost Highway," like Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (which
also involves a man who loses the same woman twice), can be
seen as a film-noir variation on the Orpheus myth. In this
case, Orpheus unconsciously murders his Eurydice out of
sexual jealousy, then creates a new identity to have a
second chance with her.
"For me, Fred converts into Pete to try again, to have a
better life, to be younger and more attractive to this
unattainable woman," Ms. Neuwirth said. "So he enters this
world of phantasma. But Alice is just another Renee. Again
he has to kill." In the opera's first half, the characters
speak their lines; in the second - the "phantasma" - they
sing.
Ms. Neuwirth and her librettist, Elfriede Jelinek, have
stuck very closely to Mr. Lynch and Barry Gifford's
screenplay, and the opera is performed in English. Ms.
Jelinek, also Austrian, wrote the novel that served as the
basis for Michael Haneke's disturbing film "The Piano
Teacher," and last year she won Germany's top literary
award, the Heine Prize.
"I consider `Lost Highway' one of the key works in the
history of cinema," Ms. Jelinek said. "When I saw the film
for the first time, it was like a blow to my brain stem, a
real physical sensation. It's pretty much impossible to
translate an artwork like this into another genre. But
musical theater is possible, because, like film, it is
another way of playing with time flow."
Ms. Neuwirth, who once considered becoming a filmmaker, is
particularly interested in the manipulation of time in
music. "There are all these repetitions in the film," she
said, "an interesting thing for a composer to think about
musically. So structures which occur in the first part
return in the second part, but in another context."
As in her first full-length, darkly comic opera, "Bählamms
Fest," there is a lively soundtrack of effects as well as a
complex interplay between recorded and live music,
intermingled to such an extent that you cannot separate one
from the other. Live electronics play a central role, and
Ms. Neuwirth also incorporates old radio broadcasts of pop
songs and snippets of Baroque music.
The resulting score is enigmatic and labyrinthine,
constantly morphing from one thing to the next. Ms.
Neuwirth, educated at Ircam, Pierre Boulez's
electronic-music center in Paris, knows how to bend and
twist sound like no other.
"I like to change musical structures very rapidly, or else
I get bored," she said. "I want to open petrified brains. I
play with very different types of music. It's like a
kaleidoscope." Above all, she manages to evoke the
reality-confounding dream world of Mr. Lynch's film.
Constance Hauman, the voluptuous American soprano who plays
Renee and Alice, said: "I'm in awe of Olga. She really
sheds light on David Lynch's most mysterious movie. She's
created a new medium. It's not really opera, and it's not
really musical theater. It's a unique category of its own.
It's a fusion of all kinds of different styles, which many
composers today aren't brave enough to use."
One of the few significant departures from the screenplay
is that Fred is a trumpet player, not a saxophonist. "Fred
is a trumpet player because I am a trumpet player," Ms.
Neuwirth said. "His story became mine, true for me, my lost
highway."
She won't say any more on the subject.
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