A powerhouse trio of American songs will interpret the voice of Virginia Woolf in New York’s prestigious Metropolitan Opera stage, as the highly anticipated run of The Hours makes its world premiere Tuesday.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Oscar-nominated film explores how threads of English writer Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” tie three women of different generations together, and its darkly moving operatic adaptation offers a new vision of the drama that probes themes including mental illness and the alienation from a tradition that haunts its protagonists.
The production began with a pitch from Renee Fleming, widely considered the leading American soprano of her generation, whose role as the show’s Clarissa Vaughan marks her return to the Met after bidding adieu to her trademark role in Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier” in 2017.
“It was perfect for opera because of the complexity of dealing with three periods,” Fleming said of The Hours, whose music was written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts.
“Music gives a kind of a river, on which we can all sort of float — together or separately,” Fleming said of the three-pronged production.
Fleming’s Vaughan — a 1990s-era New Yorker who mirrors the character Clarissa Dalloway, and whose plotline centers on her party-planning for a friend, a renowned poet dying of AIDs — is joined onstage by the Broadway and opera star Kelli O’Hara, who performs as the depressed 1950s housewife Laura Brown.
Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato plays the struggling Woolf herself.