The Narcissistic Fish

Composer Samuel Bordoli and librettist Jenni Fagan reveal how they went about creating The Narcissistic Fish.

Where did the idea for an opera film originally come from?

Samuel Bordoli: I’ve been Scottish Opera’s Composer in Residence since 2017, and I was discussing the idea of some kind of multimedia production with the Company’s General Director Alex Reedijk. It was a very open brief: he just asked me to go away and think about what it might be. I realised that I didn’t want it to be any kind of video installation, but probably as close to a performance as possible. Then I started talking to Antonia Bain, who’s the Company’s Digital Content Producer and also a film director, and we worked together on that concept. We wanted to make a film that happened to be an opera, not a film of an opera.

How did you come up with the early ideas for the setting and storyline?

SB: Antonia and I initially had in mind a completely different scenario, which we were working on without any librettist. But I went off that original idea and suggested a kitchen setting, which Antonia also really liked. We then spoke to Jenni Fagan about the concept and asked her to think about the specifics of narrative and characters. And she put a lot of work into that – I think the end result works really well, and it was great to work with her. We knew there would be three singers because of practical constraints, and three characters seemed like a solid number too.

Jenni Fagan: Antonia and Sam had several early ideas they were keen on, and one was working in a kitchen. I loved the idea of being able to use the sound of steam, or a pot boiling, or a knife chopping to punctuate that world. I wanted to write something that felt relevant to today, and so I chose a hipster restaurant run by two young brothers who are making quite a name for themselves. One of the brothers is very narcissistic, and the other is coming to the end of his lifelong journey of both tolerating his older brother and compensating for his sibling’s lack of empathy and insight. The female character is actually the real talent behind the restaurant, and she’s been completely overlooked and taken for granted. She’s fighting back in less obvious ways. Each character has something to lose.

Turning to you, Jenni: you’ve written novels and poetry, as well as essays, screenplays and short stories, but this is your first opera libretto. Why did you feel compelled to work in opera?

JF: I was interested in writing an opera libretto that didn’t necessarily follow expectations of the form. Opera can sometimes feel like an exclusionary, elitist medium. I wanted to write interesting, working-class, tattooed, flawed, Scottish-speaking characters and have them battle out their dynamic via these huge operatic voices.

How did you find writing the libretto drew on your previous writing experiences?

JF: All of my writing has a similar ethic, in that I will go as far as I have to, in order to create something authentic and unique to itself. I try not to repeat the same stories over and over, but to create stand-alone works that have their own identity. I drew on my script-writing experience, song-writing skills, poetry and literature – they all had something to offer.

Did you find that creating text for an opera libretto was different from texts for poetry, novels or plays?

JF: There’s a specific need to consider voice in opera that’s different to the way I approach voice in literature. The notes will elongate any sentence, the poetics must not be too ornate (for my taste), and the story must be concise. I don’t think there’s space to digress endlessly when people are singing an aria.

How much did the kitchen setting influence your ideas, do you think?

JF: Sets or locations are something I very much enjoy creating, so I wanted to design a loft-type restaurant with an open, industrial-style kitchen but take it off key – perhaps the kitchen could be in the underworld, or it might have a nod to Twin Peaks just because of the lighting. Playing with that was a good way to create atmosphere and tell us a lot more about each character.

What was the relationship between the film’s storyboard, the score and the libretto? Which came first?

SB: I think the storyboard came first, but it was a very collaborative process, up to the point where I had to start writing notes on manuscript paper. Antonia obviously led the storyboarding, and we were then led by Jenni’s libretto, which she adapted somewhat because of the demands of setting it to music. But that’s probably the most normal part of the process – it’s what would happen anyway between a librettist and a composer.

Jenni: how did you find the process of collaborating with Sam, and of sharing ideas between the two of you?

JF: I was left to rewrite and finalise the text, with a few meetings to give me feedback on individual drafts. Sam had questions about the pronunciation of certain Scots words, also character development on earlier ideas – he felt at one point that my brothers were a little too dark, for instance. I pulled the story apart and put it back together a few times. I do that with everything I write. Sam most enjoyed how I write as a poet, so I was happy to write the libretto as if it were a poem. I write everything as if it’s a poem, to be honest, even if it’s only apparent to me. The final version is very close to my original text: making the changes was more a process of refining the story and allowing each character to stand out and have their own journey.

Turning back to you, Sam: did the kitchen setting give you immediate ideas for the opera’s sound world?

SB: I had some vague ideas, yes, mainly about instrumentation. It seemed like a good opportunity to play around with the kitchen setting – pots and pans, food processors and other things. As I did more work on the score, I decided they would start real but then become more integrated into the score to that they almost became musical instruments, and some of them have ended up so heavily processed that you wouldn’t know where their original sound came from. The other instruments you hear are all actually processed real instruments, manipulated strings and winds. It’s mostly an electronic score. We couldn’t use real musicians because all of this work was done during the lockdown, so I ended up using virtual instruments. The only thing I planned early on is to do with tempo in the first half of the opera. The tempo is indicated by a kitchen implement – a knife sharpening and other things. When the next tempo comes in, it forms a cross-rhythm over the top of the first rhythm and then becomes the new beat. It modulates rhythmically three times during the course of the piece.

Did the fact that it was going to be a film dictate how you approached writing the music?

SB: It did. I wrote all the vocal music first, to a click track, with very sketchy harmonic accompaniment, just as a guide so that the singers had something to go on. Then we recorded them singing to the click track, so we had the audio recording of just their voices. After that, I put in the rest of the score on the computer using virtual instruments and other sounds, which of course didn’t exist at the beginning of the process. It felt almost like when actors have to act to a balloon on a stick because the CGI hasn’t been done, because nobody really knew what what the final score was going to sound like. Including me!

How did you approach shooting the film when it reached that stage?

SB: The film was shot to the vocal recording. We had planned that there wouldn’t need to be any changes, and actually the tempo track would dictate the edit. But in the end there were a couple of places where the visuals needed additional music between vocal passages, which was fine. But we were pretty much completely locked into the singing – obviously it was impossible to change it once it had been recorded.

And how did you find working on the rest of the music after the audio track of the voices had been recorded?

SB: That was quite unnerving, because I knew if I had any doubts about the vocal lines, it was tough. But the fun thing was having the singing in advance and then playing around with different harmonies. I did reharmonise one section. Again, that would never happen in a staged production – to be writing music with a singer’s voice in your ear, rather than just imagining how it would sound. But it was exciting because I could create it exactly as it would eventually sound.

Jenni: why did you make the decision to write the libretto in Scots?

JF: I like writing in Scots, especially poetry, so it made sense to me not just to produce just another standard English opera libretto. I adore the musicality and emotive qualities of language. Scots was the only choice I could have made for this one. It’s important to write in Scots when I want to because the idea that our only ‘proper’ language is English is outdated and doesn’t serve culture at all. There’s a richness and nuance to Scots that I hoped might work brilliantly in a libretto. I also wanted my voices to be far more working-class. It’s a way of challenging expectations of opera. I wanted my characters to be young, dark-humoured, fast-talking, hard-working, flawed people.

And Sam, how did you find setting a libretto written in Leith Scots?

SB: It was quite challenging! It’s hard enough to make English sound good in opera. Doing it in Scots made it even harder. But what was good about the language, as Jenni says, is that it actually removes the work from the world of opera. It takes it somewhere else, away from that tradition. I obviously tried to think about the different pronunciation with the setting. There were some words Jenni used that we just couldn’t make work. Some words just sound ridiculous when they’re sung, whatever the language, so we asked her to change those. But actually you can do different things melodically with Scots and English, so it was very creative in that sense.

How would you describe the themes behind the work?

JF: The themes were narcissism and the undermining and negligence in paying working-class women appropriately for their talent, flair, dedication and hard work.

It’s obviously coincidental that a new film opera should be premiered at the time of a global pandemic, when live performances are suspended. But how would you describe the relationship between The Narcissistic Fish and our current circumstances?

SB: In practical terms, luckily all the work that’s needed to be done on The Narcissistic Fish in post-production has been people sitting individually in studios, which has been great. But we’ve been working on it for several months, and we had no idea it would be coming out in these circumstances. At the back of our minds, we knew it was an experiment in what opera could be, using technology and everything else. And it has suddenly become very relevant.

From made-for-TV experiments to lavish big-screen productions, opera, television and film have conducted a decades-long love affair – with predictably varied results. David Kettle examines their sometimes tempestuous relationship.

They seem like two different worlds. On the one hand, the visceral immediacy, the flamboyant, grand-scale emotions, the larger-than-life acting, the live, person-to-person experience, the unapologetic, glorious, self-conscious artificiality of opera. On the other, the understated, implicit emotions conveyed in a glance or a raised eyebrow, the pre-recorded objectivity, the close-ups, pans and establishing shots, the studied apparent naturalism of television and film.

Those are gross generalisations, of course. But there’s plenty of truth in them. And yet those two seemingly irreconcilable worlds – however different they might be – have conducted a long-term flirtation since TV and film’s earliest days – a time when, of course, opera was already a far more mature suitor, around four centuries older than its youthful, techno-savvy paramour.

But let’s make a distinction upfront about the fruits of these liaisons. It’s a distinction beween operas conceived and created specifically for the screen – whether that’s a large screen in front of a cinema audience, or a small screen in the corner of a living room – and operas adapted for the screen from existing works originally conceived for the stage.

And though it’s not quite cut and dried, that distinction by and large separates operas on TV from operas on film. There are far fewer (actually, hardly any) operas intended for the cinema that were specifically conceived and created as such. By contrast, there are really quite a few operas that were created specifically for TV, as we’ll find out.

Things began strongly for opera at the movies. Arnold Schoenberg was one of the first composers to get excited about film’s potential, and way back in 1913 planned a silent film to accompany his music drama Die glückliche Hand, though it never came together. Friedrich Feher’s 1936 The Robber Symphony was the first opera specifically conceived as a sound film, but, despite an excited reception from critics who hailed it as the first example of a whole new art form, it was also pretty much the last.

Ironically, one of the most successful original operas conceived specifically for film in our own times comes from another culture entirely. The 2006 movie Opera Jawa by Indonesian director Garin Nugroho is a present-day take on Hindu epic the Ramayana set in a Javanese village, and funnels traditional Javanese music into a form that directly emulates Western opera. The result is breathtakingly spectacular, but undeniably operatic.

This relative absence of operas conceived for the cinema is almost certainly down to issues of cost. Investing the enormous sums required for a feature-length film of a brand new work, let alone securing widespread distribution in a dog-eat-dog commercial marketplace, has clearly proved too much of a challenge. And though TV costs are still considerable, they’re less prohibitively so – and for networks with a public service remit, providing what’s deemed high art to connoisseurs and newcomers alike has evidently been more of a priority. Indeed, as we’ll see, early TV executives felt it was their responsibility to take opera to the broadest possible audience, and to forge new artistic forms in doing so.

The first TV operas
Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors is usually described as the first ‘TV opera’, but strictly speaking, that accolade actually goes to a far obscurer work, the light-hearted Cinderella by jazz bandleader and classical composer Spike Hughes, given its BBC TV broadcast on 13 December 1938. And though not strictly written for television – it had its premiere on BBC radio earlier that year – it’s at least a broadcast opera, if one with a rather short life.

When discussions were underway as to whether it should return to screens the following year, the BBC’s head of television design Peter Bax dismissed it as ‘rather precious and lacking in humour’, and it was politely shelved. That didn’t stop Hughes writing another TV opera, however, and his St Patrick’s Day was premiered the other side of the war, in 1947.

Just four years later, however, TV opera properly made its mark. At its first broadcast on Christmas Eve 1951, it’s estimated that Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors was seen by more than five million viewers on 35 NBC-affiliated networks right across America. That’s a staggering figure, almost certainly a larger audience in a single evening than any other opera has drawn across its entire history.

Amahl and the Night Visitors went on to become a seasonal TV institution, in the US at least, with several further TV productions in subsequent years. And with its touching storyline of a wide-eyed disabled boy encountering the Three Wise Men on their way to visit the infant Jesus, its lush, Romantic score and its concise, 45-minute running time, it’s not hard to see why Menotti’s opera was such a success.

Indeed, mass appeal was a big part of Amahl and the Night Visitors’ conception. It was commissioned by NBC, and the brainchild of General Music Manager Samuel Chotzinoff and Artistic Director Peter Herman Adler (who had studied with Anton Zemlinsky in Prague). Adler was one of TV opera’s early pioneers, and would oversee the commissioning of several new operas for NBC over subsequent years, his stated intentions being to ‘bridge the gap between the mass audience and the opera house’ and ‘develop a new kind of opera’.

A strange disregard for television
It’s ironic, then, that Menotti himself later admitted: ‘I must confess that in writing Amahl and the Night Visitors, I hardly thought of television at all.’ That’s despite being asked specifically for a TV opera. Indeed, Amahl and the Night Visitors has had numerous live stagings down the years, and there’s nothing about the work that restricts it specifically to the medium of television.

In an interview from 1981, Menotti went further, showing perhaps surprising scorn for the genre that had brought him such success: ‘I think that opera on television loses as much of a new audience as it attracts. That is because most opera shown on television is so bad. Opera is not for television unless it is written for television. To adapt an opera for television, you need a superb cameraman and a superb director. I frankly believe that most operas are directed abominably, and once you put on television a close-up of a heavily made-up fat singer with her mouth wide open revealing her wobbly tongue and she acts with exaggerated gestures, people just laugh and close the television.’

Harsh, but – perhaps – fair, at least as an observation on stage productions thrown on the screen with little thought as to the fundamental differences between the two genres. It’s a collision that’s become all the more apparent today, of course, with the profusion of live cinema and online streams from opera houses across the world. And, while the aim of those broadcasts is clearly to capture the spirit and atmosphere of a staged performance on screen, today’s singers nonetheless receive special coaching on adjusting their performances with an awareness of the cameras.

But returning to Menotti, there’s an undeniable irony that he should make such a harsh judgement of operas not specifically written for television when Amahl and the Night Visitors feels so much like a stage work, and hardly sets out to exploit of the specific opportunities that TV offers.

He rectified that situation the following decade, however, in a later opera he created for NBC. His 1963 Labyrinth is arguably the first TV opera to rely on effects that could only realistically be created on television (or film) – from a zero-gravity sequence to a train that magically transforms into a swimming pool. Sadly, however, it wasn’t only Labyrinth’s demanding special effects that discouraged further performances. Audiences and critics alike found its allegorical tale of a bride and groom lost in a mysterious hotel rather baffling. Perhaps its subtitle – ‘An Operatic Riddle’ – summed it up all too well.

TV opera spreads internationally
Nevertheless, the remarkable success of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors encouraged NBC to commission a whole series of TV operas in the 1950s and 1960s, including Martinů’s The Marriage (1953) and Lukas Foss’s Griffelkin (1955). The trend spread across the Atlantic to the BBC, which likewise commissioned operas including Arthur Benjamin’s Mañana and Malcolm Arnold’s The Open Window, both in 1956.

It spread to other US television networks, too. CBS set its sights high and commissioned no less a figure than Igor Stravinsky to write The Flood, first broadcast on 14 June 1962. But things didn’t turn out quite as the network hoped. Stravinsky enthused that he appreciated the simplicity, economy and directness that TV offered, indeed required, feeling they were qualities that chimed with his own artistic values. ‘The saving of musical time interests me more than anything visual,’ he said. ‘This new musical economy was the one specific of the medium which guided my conception of The Flood. Because the succession of visualisations can be instantaneous, the composer may dispense with the afflatus of overtures, connecting episodes, curtain music.’

What Stravinsky came up with in The Flood, however, was quite an abstract work melding together opera, dance and spoken text. And though its story – the Biblical tale of Noah’s Ark – was familiar, his treatment was somewhat alienating – not to mention short, running to just 25 minutes. CBS was therefore obliged to pad out its hour-long TV transmission slot with documentary shorts, pious commentary on the Biblical tale and more, all sectioned up by ads, of course. Maybe not surprisingly, critical reaction remained rather cool.

Britten’s Owen Wingrave

At least ads are not something the BBC has had to deal with. And though it was hardly the network’s first foray into TV opera, in 1966 the BBC embarked on its biggest, highest-profile operatic project, from the country’s most prominent composer. It was none other than David Attenborough, then Controller of BBC2, who commissioned Benjamin Britten to write an opera for television, and who remained closely involved in the project right through to its broadcast on 16 May 1971, travelling to Snape Maltings for Owen Wingrave’s recording the previous November. From the start, Owen Wingrave was planned as a big, ambitious, elaborate work, bringing together a large cast of some of British opera’s most prestigious names, including Benjamin Luxon, Heather Harper, Janet Baker and, naturally, Britten’s partner Peter Pears (pictured below as General Sir Philip Wingrave in the original TV production).

And as with his 1954 The Turn of the Screw, Britten turned to a ghost story by Henry James for inspiration. Owen Wingrave’s eponymous protagonist is the last in the noble line of a proud military family, but his devoutly pacifist beliefs – which mirror the composer’s own – lead him to rebel against his relations’ expectations. Accused of outright cowardice, he is forced to demonstrate his bravery by confronting the ghosts – quite literally – of his ancestry.

And though hardly the most performed of Britten’s operas, Owen Wingrave nonetheless gets its fair share of stage performances, and indeed was conceived for both television and the opera house. In fact, at the time of its 1966 commission, Britten and Pears didn’t even own a television, and it’s been suggested that the composer wasn’t keen on the new-fangled technology. When Snape Maltings was being converted into a concert hall in the mid-1960s, for example, he specifically resisted suggestions that it should incorporate wiring and facilities for TV broadcasts.

Nevertheless, Britten clearly embedded televisual thinking into his conception, right from the opera’s arresting opening, whose series of chiming chords are specifically designed to coincide with changes to camera shots – in this case, showing the portraits of Owen’s forebears, who will play such a decisive role in his eventual fate.

New channel, new vision
More than a decade later, Harrison Birtwistle’s Yan Tan Tethera was another BBC-commissioned TV opera, but one that never received the TV production intended for it. Named after a traditional northern English numbering system for counting sheep in use before the Industrial Revolution (1=yan, 2=tan, 3=tethera, and so on), it’s a ritualistic, darkly magical story of jealousy between two shepherds, imprisoned twin children, and the sinister, devilish Bad’un, set to a libretto by poet Tony Harrison based on a traditional folk tale.

Though it was commissioned jointly by BBC Radio 3 and BBC2 television, the funding had come entirely from Radio 3, and when BBC2 planners got cold feet about a made-for-TV opera production, Radio 3 sought permission from the BBC governors to approach Channel 4 with the project. The commercial network finally broadcast Yan Tan Tethera in 1987 as part of a series of programmes that also featured Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy in a production by David Freeman’s iconoclastic Opera Factory. So delayed had Yan Tan Tethera been, however, that it had already been given its stage premiere, at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, which is what Channel 4 recorded and broadcast.

Indeed, Channel 4 has had a proud history of opera productions from its launch in 1982, one no doubt inspired by the network’s founding Chief Executive, (Glasgow-born) Jeremy Isaacs, who would go on to head the Royal Opera House as his subsequent job in 1987. It was Isaacs who made a strong commitment to the arts and culture right from the channel’s opening (he warned that he’d throttle his successor, Michael Grade, if he betrayed the trust placed in him about this aspect of the channel’s remit).

Accordingly, in 1989 the channel made the decision to embark on a series of six hour-long, made-for-TV operas. There were very specific stipulations: each opera should be precisely 51:45 in length, including the opening titles and closing credits, to make an hour’s programming when commercial breaks were added; and each should depend entirely on the possibilities offered by TV rather than traditional stage techniques (or, in the words of Channel 4, be ‘unsuitable for live performance’).

The eclectic results, which welcomed in jazz and pop musicians alongside classical composers, were predictably provocative and somewhat mixed, and several have been long forgotten. (The full list, since you’re probably wondering, is: Orlando Gough’s The Empress; Anthony Moore’s Camera; Stewart Copeland’s Horse Opera; Michael Torke’s King of Hearts; Gerald Barry’s The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit; and Kate and Mike Westbrook’s Good Friday 1663.) Of them all, Barry’s Handel-inspired The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit has had the longest afterlife, in several stage productions around the world, including at the 2002 Aldeburgh Festival and its US premiere four years later in Los Angeles.

Despite any notions of success and failure, however, what’s crucial is Channel 4’s commitment to TV opera, and indeed its questioning of what opera can be, in works that strain against any restrictions of form and genre. Some of these works might unavoidably feel dated, but there’s no denying that they were pioneering in their time, nor that they were conceived with the ambition not only to create new operas, but also to redefine what opera even is.

From TV to film

Channel 4 continued its long-standing commitment to TV opera in the 2000s, with Judith Weir’s Crusades-based Armida broadcast on Christmas Day 2005, in a production filmed on location in Morocco, and Jonathan Dove’s Man on the Moon, inspired by astronaut Buzz Aldrin, on Boxing Day 2006. Prior to those two productions, however, came director Penny Woolcock’s ambitious film of John Adams’s controversial The Death of Klinghoffer, shot entirely on location on a specially hired cruise ship in the Mediterranean, and first broadcast on Channel 4 in 2003.

It’s one of the most ambitious – and costly – opera productions to appear on TV screens, and is rightly held up as one of the most successful. The combination of Adams’s operatic treatment of the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985 and Woolcock’s sometimes distressingly naturalistic filming made the production all the more immediate, and therefore all the more comprehensible as an opera experienced via television.

Indeed, so lavish and detailed is The Death of Klinghoffer’s filming that it almost feels as if it belongs in the cinema. As we’ve already seen, however, far fewer operas have been specifically conceived for the silver screen. In fact, if you see an opera at the movies, it’s almost certain to be a sumptuous version of an established classic of the repertoire. There are cases where opera films set out to do little more than entertain and divert, and there’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But when film operas are pioneering, it’s usually in their interrogation or radical reframing of the operas they’re presenting, in the same manner as a probing stage production.

One of the first operas on film was Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s characteristically colourful, vibrant version of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann from 1951 (pictured above), in which the British film-making partners seemed intent on matching the expressiveness of Offenbach’s music with equally memorable, striking imagery.

Later opera films have achieved some remarkable successes, from Joseph Losey’s politically charged 1979 Don Giovanni (complete with opening epigram by Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci) to Hans-Jurgen Syderberg’s stylised, avant-garde Parsifal in 1982, which overtly interrogates Wagner’s co-opting by the Nazis.

Ingmar Bergman blurred theatre and film in his proto-post-modernist 1975 The Magic Flute, depicting what’s essentially the story of a staging, complete with shots of an appreciative audience, and one in which the singers and the characters they’re playing become increasingly indistinguishable. Watch it on YouTube here

And though not strictly speaking a film of a real opera, it would be churlish not to mention Bugs Bunny’s sole foray into the opera house. Warner Bros’ 1957 cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? is a delectable send-up of Wagnerian extravagance (and, it should be said, of Disney’s Fantasia), with a plot (such as it is) colliding together elements of the Ring, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser as a Siegfried-impersonating Elmer Fudd at first attempts to hunt Bugs, and is then seduced by the Bunny’s unconvincing impersonation of Brünnhilde. Composer Milt Franklyn clearly had lots of fun incorporating Wagnerian leifmotifs into his own typically madcap cartoon score, and it’s interesting to note, too, that back in 1957, it was clearly assumed that cartoon audiences would get at least some of the operatic references. You wonder if the same would be true in 2020. In any case, another of What’s Opera, Doc?’s send-ups is the tragic operatic heroine – which we’ll return to shortly.

And of course, there’s a proud history of directors who have worked equally successfully in both the film studio and in the opera house. Franco Zeffirelli is rightly celebrated in both film and staged opera – perhaps the summation of his work, his sumptuous 1983 movie of La traviata, combines both forms magnificently and regularly tops viewers’ picks of the best opera films. Zeffirelli began his stage career as an assistant to Luchino Visconti, who himself was as celebrated for directing Maria Callas at La Scala as he was for movies such as The Leopard and Death in Venice.

Or just think of Werner Herzog’s many Wagner productions (including Lohengrin at Bayreuth in 1987), or Terry Gilliam’s The Damnation of Faust and Benvenuto Cellini for English National Opera. There are more surprising examples, too. How about Woody Allen, who grappled with Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi in Spoleto and Los Angeles in 2015? Or revered Austrian director Michael Haneke, who brought his unforgiving, clinical analysis to a chilly, straight-faced Così fan tutte in Madrid in 2012?

From movie screen to opera house
But rather than operas transformed into movies, many of the most fruitful collisions between the two art forms, in recent years at least, have occurred in the opposite direction: movies transformed into operas.

Particularly close to Scottish Opera’s heart is Missy Mazzoli’s 2016 Breaking the Waves, given its European premiere by the Company at last year’s Edinburgh International Festival, and based on the controversial 1996 film by Lars von Trier in which a woman attempts to heal her paralysed husband through her own increasingly extreme sexual liaisons with other men.

Another of the iconoclastic Danish director’s films got the operatic treatment, too: his 2000 movie Dancer in the Dark, already a musical (and starring Björk as the poverty-stricken, near-blind immigrant Selma fighting to save the eyesight of her son), became a fully fledged opera in 2007 in the hands of von Trier’s compatriot Poul Ruders. Tragic heroines prove a rather problematic bridge between these two worlds: von Trier has been criticised for subjecting his female lead characters to unremitting misery and often cruel demises, so it’s perhaps hardly surprising that the world of opera, populated as it is by abused and unhappy women, has found his work such a comfortable fit.

Elsewhere, British composer Thomas Adès unveiled his operatic version of Luis Buñuel’s claustrophobic 1962 film The Exterminating Angel at the 2016 Salzburg Festival to great acclaim, and Nico Muhly’s Hitchcock-inspired Marnie was premiered at English National Opera the following year. More radically, Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth made an operatic version of David Lynch’s notoriously bewildering Lost Highway in 2003, in which a jazz musician, framed for the murder of his wife, inexplicably tranforms into an entirely different man while in prison. Neuwirth’s eclectic creation, blending spoken dialogue with sung text (its libretto is by Nobel prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek), and acoustic instruments with brooding electronic soundscapes, is just as elusive and idiosyncratic as Lynch’s dreamlike movie.

Horror opera
Most unusual of all, however, is the 2008 opera by Howard Shore (best known for his soundtracks to the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy) based on David Cronenberg’s 1986 horror movie The Fly, premiered to rather cool reviews in Paris in 2008. It was Shore who wrote the music for Cronenberg’s original movie, and likewise Cronenberg who directed Shore’s opera on the stage. Horror opera is a genre that’s seldom been explored, and judging by the reception that Shore’s The Fly received, there’s perhaps a reason for that.

And part of that reason, perhaps, is that horror is a genre most strongly associated with film, one that exploits the special effects, the jump-scares, the brooding menace that film can so readily generate, and which opera struggles to evoke. And as such, The Fly demonstrates why meldings and meshings between the two worlds don’t always produce results that are greater than the sum of their parts.

No, it doesn’t always work. And there’s no denying that relations between opera, film and television have been messy, chaotic, sometimes hit and miss. But they’ve also often been brilliantly creative. Some remarkable works have been produced in the intersection of film/TV and opera, in pioneering cross-fertilisations that have succeeded in both directions.

And though elements of their respective styles and vocabularies might make film/TV and opera seem like two irreconcilably different worlds, there’s a crucial factor that unites them: suspension of disbelief. Whether it’s accepting the larger-than-life stories and over-the-top flamboyance of grand opera, or the more implicit, calculated artificiality of film, they both demand that viewers surrender themselves to their all-consuming, sometimes overwhelming experiences. Not for nothing do both happen (usually) in darkened rooms, designed to eliminate distractions and make the experience as immersive as it can be. Opera and the screen (whether large or small) have conducted a chequered relationship of liaisons and rejections, generating offspring both celebrated and unwanted, but it’s a noble lineage to which Scottish Opera’s The Narcissistic Fish adds its own distinctive contribution.

David Kettle is Scottish Opera’s Programme Editor. He is also a music critic for The Scotsman and The Daily Telegraph, and has written about music for a broad range of publications including Classical Music, The Strad, The List, The Times and BBC Music Magazine.

Antonia Bain – Director

Scottish Opera’s in-house film-maker Antonia Bain studied fine art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. An internship with multimedia design company 55degrees led to a full-time role as content producer, and in that role she made several short films for Glasgow’s award-winning Riverside Museum. She has made short films, music videos and short documentaries. She joined Scottish Opera in 2015 and has produced promotional and cultural films for the Company’s social media and website. Highlights include creating a filmed performance of former Scottish Opera Composer in Residence Lliam Paterson’s piece In Glasgow, based on Edwin Morgan’s poem, and an opera/pop crossover with Scottish singers Be Charlotte and Carla J Easton as part of the BBC’s #OperaPassion Day. The Narcissistic Fish is her first opera short film for Scottish Opera.

Samuel Bordoli – Composer

Samuel Bordoli ARAM is Scottish Opera’s Composer in Residence. During the 2017/18 Season he composed Wings and three piano interludes for the Opera Highlights tour, and Grace Notes to complement the Company’s production of Ariadne auf Naxos. In the 2018/19 Season, he composed an Overture and To Music for the Autumn 2018 Opera Highlights tour, as well as Le trésor des humbles for soprano and orchestra, premiered in March at Aberdeen’s Music Hall. He studied at Birmingham Conservatoire and London’s Royal Academy of Music, where he was the Mendelssohn Scholar. He was mentored by Peter Maxwell Davies for nine years. His broad output has included a chamber opera, Amerika, performed at the Tête à Tête opera festival in London, and a choral anthem, The Great Silence, premiered at the Windsor Festival for the Queen’s 90th Birthday. His music theatre piece Belongings was premiered on the Caledonian Sleeper between Aberdeen and London. He has also composed four Live Music Sculptures, site-specific compositions for London landmarks, including Tower Bridge, the Monument and St Paul’s Cathedral, and co-produced Planets 2018, a new ‘Planets Suite’ performed inside planetariums across the UK.

Arthur Bruce – Angus

Scottish baritone Arthur Bruce is The Robertson Trust Scottish Opera Emerging Artist 2019/20. He is a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s Opera School, the Royal Northern College of Music, English National Opera’s Opera Works programme and Scottish Opera’s Connect Ensemble. He is a Britten-Pears Young Artist.

Scottish Opera appearances: Amadeus & The Bard, Opera Highlights Spring 2020.

Operatic engagements include: title role Gianni Schicchi (RCS Opera School); Papageno The Magic Flute (Berlin Opera Academy); Zurga The Pearl Fishers (Edinburgh Grand Opera); Guglielmo Così fan tutte (London Young Sinfonia); Wolfram Tannhäuser (Edinburgh Players Opera Group); Sam Trouble in Tahiti (RCS Opera School); Prince Yamadori Madama Butterfly (Bowdon Festival Opera).

Charlie Drummond – Belle

Born in Lincoln, Charlie Drummond is a Scottish Opera Emerging Artist 2019/20. She studied at King’s College London, the Opera School at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the National Opera Studio. She is also a Samling Young Artist.

Scottish Opera appearances: Opera Highlights Autumn 2019, Iris.

Operatic engagements include: title role Anna Bolena (cover) (Longborough Festival Opera); Donna Anna Don Giovanni (British Youth Opera); Rosalinde Die Fledermaus, Fiordiligi Così fan tutte, Countess The Marriage of Figaro, Mrs Julian Owen Wingrave, Eleonora Prima la musica e poi le parole by Salieri (RCS); Sofia Il signor Bruschino (Raucous Rossini); Serena Farage The Secretary Turned CEO by Danyal Dhondy – world premiere (Lucid Arts); Voice Simoon by Erik Chisholm – world premiere (Music Co-OPERAtive Scotland).

Jenni Fagan – Librettist

Born in Scotland, poet and novelist Jenni Fagan graduated from Greenwich University and won a scholarship to the Royal Holloway MFA programme. She is currently completing a PhD on structuralism and Kafka’s Metamorphosis at the University of Edinburgh. She has won awards from organisations including Creative Scotland, Dewar Arts and Scottish Screen, and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists after the publication of her debut novel, The Panopticon, which was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. Her own adaptation of The Panopticon was staged by the National Theatre of Scotland. Her second novel, The Sunlight Pilgrims, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Award and the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award, and won her Scottish Author of the Year at the Herald Culture Awards. Her third novel, Luckenbooth, is due for publication in January 2021. She has also published four collections of poetry, and recently directed her debut short film. She has written a second short film, Isolation, as part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Scenes for Survival project, which is being shown on BBC iPlayer and online. The Narcissistic Fish is her first opera libretto.

Mark Nathan – Kai

Born in Surrey, Mark Nathan is a Scottish Opera Emerging Artist 2019/20. He is a graduate of the Opera School at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where he studied with Scott Johnson, following earlier studies at Birmingham University and London’s Royal College of Music.

Scottish Opera appearances: Rabotnik The Fiery Angel, Opera Highlights Autumn 2019.

Operatic engagements include: title role Don Giovanni, Marcello La bohème (Opera Loki); Papageno The Magic Flute (Hampstead Garden Opera); Joseph De Rocher Dead Man Walking, Death Savitri, Director Les mamelles de Tirésias (RCS); Joseph De Rocher (cover) (Welsh National Opera, Israeli Opera); Dr Falke Die Fledermaus, Judge and Counsel Trial by Jury, Wagner Faust (Winterbourne Opera); Jack Point The Yeomen of the Guard (Portsmouth Guildhall); Koko The Mikado (Co-Opera); Dr Pangloss Candide (London Musical Theatre Orchestra); Sir Joseph Porter HMS Pinafore (Harwich Festival of the Arts); Doctor La traviata (Opera Euphonia); Gob The Poisoned Kiss (Barber Institute Summer Festival); Moralès Carmen (Riverside Opera).