Atonement

This seriously just made my day. According to the New York Times, the production is set to premiere in 2013 (!) and will be worked on by Michael Berkeley, who will provide the music,Craig Raine who will write the libretto and McEwan who will be giving creative input. While I have yet to research either of the other two individuals involved, I’m excited that McEwan will be directly involved in this project and appears to be friends with the other two.

"Atonement, the bestselling novel about class and love set in the second World War by Ian McEwan, is to be made into an opera. "

The Telegraph article gives some fantastic quotes regarding the direction of the production, which happily matches exactly how I would have envisioned the transition from text to opera. The basic plot of “Atonement,” (for those who haven’t been following my ramblings on the novel last year), revolves around “the doomed love affair between the aristocratic Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner, her bright but socially inferior lover. Cecilia’s younger sister, consumed with jealousy, makes a disastrous mistake that changes all their lives.” McEwan comments, “It’s not a chamber piece, that’s for sure. You can do some very dramatic things with this. If you were thinking of a large scale opera then what springs to mind is 380,000 troops on the beaches of Dunkirk. That would be quite a choir.” So, it’s going to be a grandiose choral work? Yes please! 

Given some of the other quotes coming from Berkeley and Raine, it sounds like I’m going to absolutely love the tragic, romantic direction they take the material.

From Berekley, “The love affair between Robbie and Cecilia is at a distance, in letters and the mind. (Sounds like my thesis all over again!) That’s something that music can do that no other art form can. You can have them on stage together singing a duet while he’s in France (fighting in the Second World War) and she’s in a hospital in England (working as a nurse)…The main challenge is to strip it down to something that is still very moving but more skeletal, that leaves room for the music to add another dimension.”

The concept of having Robbie and Cecelia singing a long-distance duet on stage is so lovely and very appropriate for conveying the theme of their prolonged separation. There is so much content to work through in portraying their distanced love affair that I’m wondering what’s going to make the cut? Their letters, with references to literary characters? Cecelia leaving her family? The half-an-hour coffee meeting? Am I the only one who wants to hear an aria or duet built around their constant “I’ll wait for you?” 

Admittedly, I suspect the theme of literary reality with the coda ending is going to get a bit lost in translation, as it did in the movie, simply because while the heart wrenching nature of the twist ending works in any format, it took on a very theoretical nature in book form and prompted me to wonder “what did I just read?” “Who’s thoughts did I just inhabit and which characters did I just get attached to?” A large part of the novel’s strength is its exquisite ability to explore interiority and inner emotions. You feel the headiness of young love and the shock of separation right along with Robbie and Cecelia, you feel Briony’s life-long guilt, you feel Robbie’s fatigue, anger and despair. As such, when Robbie and Cecelia finally reunite, no matter how briefly, you celebrate right along with them. When the ending came around, revealing that a large part of the interiority and thoughts of the characters was a fantasy invented by Briony’s guilty conscience, it was one of the few times a book moved me to tears and left me with the very uncomfortable feeling of not knowing who these (fictional) characters were or what they actually thought, as if they were real on some level. This reaction didn’t quite come through in the movie, even if they faithfully translated the reveal. 

But nevertheless, maybe it’s the romantic in me who devoured Robbie and Cecelia’s story with a spoon, but I’m not feeling too bad about the love story getting center-stage. I will say though, along the lines of sacrificing the theoretical “nature of literary reality” vs. the romantic plot, I do hope Briony isn’t portrayed as being motivated by jealousy, and I trust that McEwan will keep a close eye on that aspect. While that sounds like a common romance plot trope, it’s quite far from the reasons for her mistake, which had much more to do with her inability to identify between the characters in her writing and the interiority of the people around her. I almost want the opera companies to omit the twist ending from the program synopsis. I’m not sure they will, but honestly, reading about that twist in a brief synopsis is no way to experience it in full. 

Unfortunately, I doubt that this opera will be coming to the US, or Seattle for that matter, anytime soon, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get my hands on either a CD of the music, or a DVD release of the production. I’m sure that as beautiful as the music is sure to be, it’s going to make me feel like my heart’s been ripped at several points.