Modern Literary Inspirations
By Rex Levang, Minnesota Public Radio, May 2003

	VIEW Photos from the Minnesota Opera Production. Photos by Michal Daniel, courtesy The Minnesota Opera Flash Slideshow Ideas on Paper Artist renderings of what the costumes will look like. Flash Slideshow The Ultramodern Set Watch the set models slowly evolve to follow the story's dark drama. Flash Slideshow READ Synopsis Follow the basic storyline of the opera. Interview with Poul Ruders and Dale Johnson MPR's Lauren Rico discusses the opera with the composer and The Minnesota Opera's artistic director. Handmaid's Tale makes U.S. Premiere MPR's Marianne Combs covers the Minnesota Opera production. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale Find out more about the book and the author, and hear MPR interviews with her. DISCUSS Discuss the novel Discuss adaptation of stories into operas EXPLORE Margaret Atwood Web site Poul Ruders Web site

When you examine this year's Minnesota Opera season, you'll notice that The Handmaid's Tale is the standout. It's the only opera by a living composer, it's the only opera written in almost a century, and its vision of a repressive future state is a far cry from the intimate drama of Traviata or the spinning wheels and sailing ships of The Flying Dutchman.

But viewed in the context of contemporary opera, it seems much more part of the mainstream. (Its composer, Poul Ruders, has said, "It's pure Tosca!") In fact, it's very much in line with two of the most visible trends in current opera.

The first is what could be called the opera of social concern, operas that, in one way or another, address social issues of the contemporary world. The starting point for this trend may have been the operas that Philip Glass began producing in the late 1970s. Though it wasn't stressed at the time - Glass's innovative musical style got most of the attention - these operas all center around social reformers of different eras: Gandhi, the pharaoh Akhenaten, Martin Luther King.

Not long after, John Adams wrote Nixon in China and then, The Death of Klinghoffer, an exploration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that remains controversial today. And Steve Reich's latest opera (if that's the right word for it), Three Tales, looks at the effects of technology in the twentieth century. The three "tales" are the Hindenburg disaster, A-bomb testing in the Pacific, and the cloning of Dolly, the sheep.

The trend isn't limited to the so-called minimalists. The lyrically minded Jake Heggie has dealt with capital punishment in Dead Man Walking, and composers of different stripes have written operas on Harvey Milk, Jackie O, and Tania (i. e. Patty Hearst). And the O. J. Simpson case, which media coverage threatened to transform into a kind of soap opera, was turned into a real opera, Nicole and the Trial of the Century, by Anthony Newman.

The other trend, just as visible, is that of operas based on well-known works of literature. Of course, this has always gone on; the standard operatic repertoire has its full complement of Fausts, Falstaffs, and Romeos. But there was a period in the mid-20th century when that trend receded -- or it traveled under a kind of incognito, as composers would employ a literary source, but transplant it to another time and place for operatic purposes, as when Carlisle Floyd moved the story of Susannah from Biblical times to the Appalachian backwoods.

But in recent years opera composers have placed their literary inspirations front and center. And if that source has a famous title in its own right, so much the better. Andre Previn has made an opera of A Streetcar Named Desire, hewing very closely to Tennessee Williams's original. The Metropolitan Opera has produced both A View from the Bridge (William Bolcom) and The Great Gatsby (John Harbison). Closer to home, Minnesota Opera audiences have seen operas based on the writings of Mary Shelley (Libby Larsen's Frankenstein) and James M. Cain (Stephen Paulus's Postman Always Rings Twice).

And just last season, the Minnesota Opera staged Mark Adamo's Little Women, an adaptation that both respected its literary source, and took it by the scruff of the neck. On the one hand, Adamo, who wrote his own libretto, left Jo March and her sisters in their original New England setting. On the other, he boldly cut and expanded the novel's episodes to achieve the dramatic shape that he was after.

In coming seasons, opera fans will be able to see what Tobias Picker will do with An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, and how Rachel Portman handles the St. Exupery classic, The Little Prince. As for Poul Ruders, he's following The Handmaid's Tale with an operatic version of The Trial by Franz Kafka. Here is one operatic trend that still seems to have a vigorous future ahead of it.