Marnie -- the opera at The Met

Nico Muhly’s opera Marnie, born at the English National Opera but now at the Met, invites a new consideration of Hitchcock’s 1964 classic film. The opera is not a response to the film but an alternative adaptation of Winston Graham’s 1961 novel. As a result, the opera’s choices invite a contrast to Hitchcock’s. 

But first, some full disclosure. I have sung at the Met. 

However, I have absolutely no qualification to write about opera or music. Nor, more to the point, the confidence. 

  But I have written about stories, analyzed narratives. So a libretto may not be entirely outside my range of interest if not authority. On this blog site you can find my two analyses of The Death of Klinghoffer — the irresponsible production of which prompted my four-year boycott of the Met “live” screenings. As the Met may not yet have noticed, their Marnie ended my boycott. 

All three versions  take Marnie’s perspective in recording her futile attempt to win her bitter mother’s affection. Marnie is a trustworthy office girl who over and over compulsively absconds with the companies’ money. All three Marnies marry the handsome executive Mark Rutland, who catches her in the act, blackmails her into marrying him, then tries to win her over by raping her. 

That fails. In all three versions, Marnie’s compulsive criminality, frigidity and constant self-recreations are traced back to a childhood incident. Marnie’s mother blamed Marnie for a murder the mother committed.

Beyond that core plot Nicholas Wright’s libretto hews closer to Graham than Hitchcock did. When Marnie visits her mother she finds a rival child serving her, a girl in Hitchcock instead of the lad in the other versions. Hitchcock’s change adds jealousy to Marnie’s emotional confusion. The surrogate son rather addresses the mother’s trauma. For she killed her illegitimate newborn son, then blamed Marnie. Hitchcock changed the murder victim to her drunken sailor john. 

He similarly eroticised the scene of Rutland’s rape, which in the novel is expressed with Marnie’s revulsion. (Hitchcock’s treatment is complicated by later revelations of his frustrated sexual obsession with the actress Tippi Hedren.) Wright’s Marnie speaks to our time with “Do you know what I mean when I say ‘No!?” The furious music amplifies her perspective. When she slips into the bathroom to slash her wrists the magnified shadow and red suffusion keep us in her perspective.  

Graham and Wright put Marnie through therapy but leave the unearthing of her trauma to her mother’s funeral scene. There the mother’s midwife friend reveals the lie that has fractured Marnie’s psyche. 

As the film played to a mass audience, however, with the dashing Sean Connery as the game hunter husband bent upon taming his wild wife, he has Rutland dig up the secret. Not for 007 to play second fiddle. Not even to the oboe that Muhly attaches to his Marnie. 

The cousin Graham assigns Rutland as a threat to Marnie takes some curious turns. Hitchcock turned him into a suspicious, jealous sister of Rutland’s late wife. Wright makes him Rutland’s delinquent younger brother Terry. His quarter-face strawberry birthmark makes him Marnie’s fellow Outsider, his facial scar a parallel to her psychological.    

Jealous of Rutland, Terry tries to seduce Marnie, fails, but continues to engage with her. When he brings the police to arrest her he fulfills his pledge to hunt her down. He claims his motive is to free her from her life of lies. 

The opera rejects the film’s last romantic promise. Marnie goes off to jail. In her handcuffs she exults “I’m free.” Rutland promises to wait and she may return to him but her freedom is not dependent upon having a husband. Just upon finally knowing herself and the source of her broken psyche. In the last scene her mother’s grave behind her provides a black horizontal that with her joyfully liberated self forms a cross. This sacrifice brings her to life.  

If Graham’s rape scene is what drew Hitchcock to the project, Marnie’s  extreme and complex emotions suggested the operatic possibilities to Muhly. The two versions find different forms of Expressionism.

The opera opens on a monochrome office hive. As we dive into the secretarial  pool Marnie is one of a battalion clattering and chattering away. There is not much emotional potential to such lyrics as “I enclose an invoice for our services” and “I like your nails.” And that is the point — the soulless mundanity of the life Marnie adopts, to exploit her exploitative male bosses, until in Rutland she meets her amoral match. 

Hitchcock’s opening shot made a similar point. Marnie walks through a scene of painstakingly concentrated greyness. The only relief is the bright yellow purse containing her loot — and reflecting her guilt. 

So, too, the different takes on Marnie’s fractured self. The opera gives her a chorus of four other Marnies, similarly dressed in bright pastels, all helmeted with her tightly-wound hair. They embody her uncertain hold on her self. In the therapy sessions they take turns on the couch. A group of shadowy Men in Grey Flannel Suits also dance around her, the demons that would abuse her but play into her strategies. They embody her energy when she rides her horse Forio, in her only scene of joyous abandon. 

Hitchcock found a different way to represent the heroine radically detached from herself, from her past. In several scenes he plays Marnie against palpably false backdrops. Her childhood home stands against an obvious painting of the dockside where her mother plied her trade. In her ecstatic escapes aboard Forio the obviously false backdrop confirmed Marnie’s detachment from herself. As it happens, Hitchcock was long criticized for these scenes, their obvious artifice considered lapses in his skill and judgment rather than expressionist rhetoric. 

The Marnie opera, finally, strikes this amateur viewer as a magnificent, wholly moving work, brilliantly staged, scored with intensity and discipline — indeed, as good in its medium as Hitchcock’s film is in his. “As good as Hitchcock” is as lavish a praise as I can accord anything. 

Oh, yes, that “full disclosure” thing. Thanks for asking. When and what did I sing at the Met? 

Several years ago my wife Anne and I did that wonderful backstage tour of the Met, ending up on the stage in the empty theatre. Apparently I was not the first to ask our guide if I might sing a bit, just to add that line to my resume. I burst out with the first verse of 
— all that came to mind — Johnny Horton’s “Well, I’m a honky tonk man.”
     I’ve sung at the Met.