Cathy and Heathcliff in Minnesota

I’ve been fascinated by Bernard Herrmann’s single opera, Wuthering Heights, ever since I heard of it somewhere years ago: the famous film composer’s only opera! Based on Emily Bronte’s only novel, that strange and demonic book! Add in my constantly thwarted attempts to find a recording, and the rarity of performances, and I figured it was time for a Twin Cities trip when Minnesota Opera put it on their schedule. (The performances will be recorded for DVD release, so future aficionados of Herrmann or Bronte won’t have the problems I had finding a good recording.) I was at the first performance, on April 16.

Herrmann’s music swells up to the great scenes, but is largely brooding and atmospheric, with many of the eerie touches for which his film scores are famous. Yet it doesn’t sound like “movie music” – that is, it stands alongside the action, rather than underlining it in the way of mid-century Hollywood films. The music frequently evokes the ghostly gray atmosphere of the wind-swept moors that play such an important part in the psychology of the story.

Projections were used extensively and instead of seeming, as they often do, like mostly a money-saving device, they stylishly brought both springtime and wintertime Yorkshire on stage. In the opening scene, the lodger Mr Lockwood seeks shelter from a raging snowstorm at Wuthering Heights. He sings about “the snow, the everlasting snow” and there was a big and unintended laugh from the audience – here it was the middle of April, and it had snowed in Minneapolis the day before, so it was a sympathizing laugh. “They’re going to have problems with that during the recording,” I heard one audience member say during intermission.

Minnesota Opera did Herrmann proud, with an excellent production and an outstanding cast of young singers. But . . . the libretto is a problem, at least for me (and probably anyone else who’s read the book). It’s not Wuthering Heights; it’s what people often think Wuthering Heights is: a brooding, fairly conventional romance. It’s not just that the opera cuts the story in half, ending with Catherine Earnshaw’s death (roughly the halfway point of the novel), or that in the transition from novel to stage you inevitably lose certain narrative nuances: the comedy of the urbane Mr Lockwood’s consistent misunderstanding of his landlord, who really is the brooding loner Lockwood considers himself to be; the sensible voice of housekeeper Nelly Dean as she tells the terrifying story; the whole atmosphere of inbred feverishness.

No, it’s that the opera fundamentally alters and softens the characters of Heathcliff and Cathy. In the novel the increasingly drunken and brutal Hindley, up on the staircase, throws his young son off the side and Heathcliff, who happens to be passing below, instinctively catches the falling child and then, equally instinctively, is horrified and regretful that he has saved his enemy Hindley from murdering his own child. In the opera (I’m going by the stage direction in the libretto I bought at the Minnesota Opera, as well as by what I saw on stage), Heathcliff confronts Hindley on the stairs and protectively takes the child out of his arms, to much more heroic effect.


Here are a few of the things Heathcliff does not do in the opera that he does in the novel: hit both women and children; hang Isabella Linton’s puppy as he elopes with her; throw a knife at her later in the marriage, cutting her in the face; terrify his own sickly effeminate son (whom he consistently and contemptuously refers to as "it") into marrying Cathy’s daughter (the second generation, except for a brief appearance by Hindley’s son, doesn’t appear at all). And his tight hold on money, so unsuitable for a romantic hero and frequently mentioned in the novel, makes no appearance in the libretto (except for a passing insinuation that he tried to become rich to be socially equal to the Lintons).

It’s a tribute to Bronte’s genius that she makes this unlikely figure one of the most memorable romantic figures in English literature. The libretto (written by Lucille Fletcher, who was married to Herrmann at the time) plays it safe, making him much more conventional. Lee Poulis as Heathcliff gave probably the most powerful performance in the very strong cast, so I mean no reflection on him when I wonder if a rougher-looking singer might have counteracted the libretto: Poulis’s tall slim build, unruly dark curls, and refined handsomeness made him the very picture of a brooding romantic loner, rather than the devil to which the novel’s Heathcliff is frequently compared.

As in the novel, Isabella writes to Nelly asking if Heathcliff is a man or a demon, but unlike in the novel, we opera-goers have no real reason to consider him evil. The unearthly (for good and ill) quality of their love is replaced by a more standard operatic emotion. There are grotesque touches, as in a quick scene in the beginning of Heathcliff embracing the skeleton of the dead Cathy, but the terrifyingly cruel and gothic obsessiveness of the novel's lovers is tamed.

Cathy (Sara Joubiak), the headstrong and sadistic, is also softened in the opera. She no longer humiliates her sister-in-law Isabella (Adriana Zabala) by forcing her to stay in the room as she tells the newly arrived Heathcliff all about Isabella’s love for him; now, they are all already in the room and Isabella brings the subject up herself. The cruel scene in which Cathy locks the door so that her husband can’t call the servants for help but instead must fight Heathcliff himself is also considerably softened (and so is Edgar Linton – in the novel, he punches Heathcliff with enough force to knock him down; in the opera, Edgar, played by Eric Margiore, simply collapses weakly on the sofa, wondering if his wife doesn’t love him any more, while Heathcliff stalks off contemptuously).

There are other clumsy elements in the libretto: Hindley’s descent into drunken debauchery and madness seems sort of arbitrary and even convenient, despite the efforts of singer Ben Wager, so it should be made clearer that it is due to misery at the death of his wife; Cathy’s violent temper should appear earlier, so that her actions don't seem quite so out of the blue when she cruelly pinches Nelly (Victoria Vargas) and then strikes Edgar when he objects. Until then we had mostly seen her singing about how much she loves the springtime flowers. There is, in my opinion, a little too much singing about the spring flowers anyway, when the time might be better spent on other aspects of the characters.

We also get not one but two “dream ballets” featuring Cathy and Heathcliff , which, though beautifully danced by Jeremy Bensussan and Megan McClellan, and not in itself a bad idea, unfortunately made me think of Curly and Laurie in Oklahoma.

It’s a puzzle to me why Herrmann, who I understand was very well read, considered this libretto an acceptable version of Wuthering Heights – why did he want this milk-and-water version of Bronte’s strange strong brew? It’s one thing to take a relatively obscure medieval legend like Tristan and Iseult (another story of obsessive, destructive love and death) and alter it so that your opera becomes in many ways the definitive version of the story. I don’t really understand why you’d take a story that is already iconic and then weaken it to this extent. Herrmann in many ways wrote a wonderful opera, but it doesn’t come near the strange and wild book. (By the way, I've also seen – once – the famous film with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, and I absolutely hated it.)

Having said all that, I should point out that I was extremely glad I made the trip to see the opera in person, and will no doubt buy the DVD as soon as it becomes available. (Perhaps with repeated viewing I can accept the opera more on its own terms, rather than on Emily Bronte's.) The words of an opera are important to me, but the music and the singing can rescue them. The first night audience seemed to enjoy the work too, judging from the attentiveness, the applause, and remarks afterward (though I did hear one stout and sensible-looking middle-aged woman saying in slightly irritated and disgusted tones, “Well, he’s crazy, she’s crazy . . . they’re both crazy!”).

I salute Minnesota Opera for staging this enticing rarity and for recording it as well. The singers I haven’t mentioned by name yet are Rodolfo Nieto as Joseph, Jesse Blumberg as Lockwood, and Joshua Ross as Hindley’s son; Michael Christie conducted and Eric Simonson directed. Everyone in the cast had amazingly good English diction; there would have been no comprehension problems even without the surtitles, which is very rarely the case. In face everyone involved in general did an outstanding job, except, unfortunately, the librettist.