Renée Fleming is rarely seen on an opera house stage today. The star soprano announced five years ago that she was retiring – not from opera, but from performing many of the roles, the Desdemonas, Violettas and Marguerites, that she had made her own on the world’s greatest stages. “I said I can’t play ingénues any more. Characters who are supposed to be very youthful. Women who are victims of circumstance.” Unfortunately for operagoers, that excised most of the 18th- and 19th-century soprano repertoire. “I wanted to be able to say words that a woman of my age and experience could say,” she adds. “Which is why my focus is on new work.”
The Hours, which will be streamed live in cinemas across Europe and the US this weekend, is a new opera by US composer Kevin Puts adapted from Michael Cunningham’s 1999 Pulitzer prize-winning novel about a single day in the lives of three generations of women: Virginia Woolf in 1920s Richmond, who will be played in this premiere staging at New York’s Metropolitan Opera by Joyce DiDonato; Laura Brown in postwar suburban Los Angeles (Kelli O’Hara); and Clarissa Vaughan – nicknamed “Mrs Dalloway” – in the New York of 2001 (Fleming). Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is the thread that connects the three, who struggle to find shape in the lives and roles allotted them, and contemplate creativity, love, regret, family, friendship and sexuality. Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film was garlanded with awards, including an Oscar for Nicole Kidman as Woolf.
“The film stayed with me all these years,” says Fleming. “I rewatched it recently and there were so many stories and sub-stories that felt relevant to today. The two women, both in situations – like all women throughout history – of caring for others, and then Virginia Woolf, a great artist living in a period when it was so very difficult for women to be great artists. Also, it highlights Aids at a time when we’re winding down from a terrible pandemic that could have been infinitely worse if we didn’t have vaccines, and then also highlighting the lives of LGBTQ people in the 90s and the 50s and in Woolf’s time. So many relevant stories.”
DiDonato points to how radical it has felt to be in an opera told through a female lens. “At the end of Bohème or Butterfly, say, you have the tenor screaming out ‘Butt-er-fly!’ or ‘Mimi’! and it’s all about him: the woman’s death is at the service of the suffering of the man. OK, that’s fine – we love those operas. But The Hours is looking at women who are in the process of figuring out their place in the world when the world is saying ‘This is what you are and this is what you are allowed to be.’”
“It’s such a breath of fresh air to play a woman of the 90s,” laughs Fleming. “I still have clothes from then! I really could be Clarissa. As a lifelong ruminator, I completely understand her constant anxiety. These are exactly the kinds of feelings people have in life. We all have regrets. We’re all in denial about certain things.”
O’Hara sees much truth in Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife seemingly living the American dream yet conflicted and unhappy underneath – though the singer can’t relate to the terrible choice her character makes. “Laura represents a lot of people we all know,” says O’Hara. “As a mother I’m not like her, but I can understand her and her experiences.”
She found the text’s concerns seeping into her real life – and on the morning of the premiere was a heartbeat away from leaving New York to be at her own mother’s side. “My mother, who’s also called Laura, had been on a transplant list for a new kidney. The night before the premiere, we got a call to say a donor had been found and she went into surgery that morning.” Thankfully, the operation went well and O’Hara was able to give a performance that became a celebration. “I consider it some sort of weird existential gift,” she says. “Maybe it’s easier to say that because she’s OK.”
To prepare, DiDonato went primarily to Woolf’s own writings, although she says: “I’m not the kind of performer who does a lot of scholastic research. I can be such a chameleon that I risk starting to become a caricature of a historically presented figure. I feel like my power comes from looking at the material and the music and the way it is presented in the opera – and bringing that character to life.”
She found a fascinating recording of Woolf speaking, her narrow RP vowels sounding painfully old-fashioned to today’s ears. “I listened to about three minutes then turned it off because it’s completely opposed to the colour of my own and what Kevin has written for me.” She was also unfamiliar with the movie. “Twenty years ago, I started to watch it but didn’t get to the end. It felt a little bleak. I just wasn’t at a point in my life where it spoke to me.” But, revisiting the story at a time when most of the west is emerging from the pandemic, and she herself was two decades older with a lot of different experiences, it really resonated. She recently watched the full film. “It has an austerity that works beautifully, but that’s not the same language of the opera. This is such a different work in a different medium.”
Opera, says Fleming, is another world entirely from film or theatre. “Kevin’s music gives every emotion enormous time. It’s not about a sentence you try to land or a facial expression – people can’t even see our facial expressions past the 10th row! We make our mark with vocal inflection and gesture.”
Puts likens the complexities of shaping the three stories across three periods to one of those mind-twisting 3D games where you have to fit different pieces together to make a cube. “I want to tell the story as vividly as possible,” says the composer, who took a different approach to that of Philip Glass, whose score for Daldry’s film got an Oscar nomination. “Glass had one vocabulary that connected it all. I loved making shifts in musical style from one to another that were sometimes surprising but more often seamless. The piece has to take you into different worlds. I found these characters very powerful: I knew they would inspire music.”
The Hours is directed by Phelim McDermott, who is acclaimed as one of the greatest interpreters of Glass’s operas. Although he finds the soundworlds of Puts and Glass very different, he can see some links: “I think what’s similar is a theatricality in their music that is begging you to turn it into something live.”
McDermott’s productions for the vast stages of the Met and the London Coliseum have invariably involved some sort of extra ensemble element that is, he says, the glue. In Glass’s Akhnaten, it was jugglers; in Cosi Fan Tutte, circus performers. Here it is 13 dancers, choreographed by Annie-B Parson. “The show starts with dance,” McDermott explains. “This is a piece about what’s going on inside these women’s heads. Dancers and the chorus are expressing those unconscious elements. Dance is like an extra voice embodied in the piece.”
Parson’s involvement was key, not least because the rest of the creative team are male. “It was important to bring a female perspective,” she says. “My first question was if we could have an all-female/non-binary dance group.” Parsons quotes Woolf exploring gender fluidity almost a century ago. As the author wrote in her 1928 novel Orlando: “In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.”
Water, a primary metaphor and image in the production, became central to the movement as well. “The dancers show that the ground is unstable,” says Parsons, “like when you’re standing on a beach and the sand shifts with the tide under your feet.” And, of course, water returns us to Woolf’s suicide, referenced obliquely here. “Woolf’s journey,” says DiDonato, “and her battle [with mental illness] is captured beautifully in the book and film – but in a different way in the opera, where there’s more space for that struggle to breathe in the music.”
All three singers talk about the “feminine energy” that has driven the piece. It’s about “being in touch with your emotional life,” says DiDonato, “with things that nourish, that create, that are heart-centred. It can be male or female. I love the fact that men wanted to tell this story. I don’t think that should be off-limits, but it has to be done with respect.”
“Kevin wrote this piece for these three amazing singers,” says McDermott. “It is about how stories are carried across time. When it was made as a film, it meant a certain thing. But opera can say things that can’t be said in any other way. It’s got this paradox, which is the massive orchestra and the voice and what the combination can do – but it can also go down to the sound of one person’s unamplified voice.”
The Hours is in UK cinemas on 10 December. It is also broadcast live on Radio 3 at 6.30pm on 10 December, then available on BBC Sounds
