Giving new voice to Virginia Woolf at the Metropolitan Opera

There is only one surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. Made in 1937, it is an eight-minute extract from a BBC radio programme entitled Words Fail Me and finds the 55-year-old writer speaking in low, cultivated tones.

Since Woolf’s premature death in 1941, interest in her as a creative writer and a woman has only grown. As well as biographies and documentaries, there have been novels about her, plays and works of art.

Now Woolf’s voice is to be heard in another context. A new opera entitled The Hours by American composer Kevin Puts, featuring Virginia Woolf as one of its main characters, has its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, this month. The opportunity to hear Woolf reimagined as a singing role raises all kinds of questions. Will she sound anything like her real-life voice? Can the music probe her fascinating character?

The opera is based on Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel The Hours, which was made into a successful film four years later. The plot follows a single day in the lives of three women who live decades apart: Woolf as she writes her novel Mrs Dalloway in 1923 and the fictional characters of Laura Brown in 1949 and Clarissa Vaughan in 1999. Themes from Woolf’s life, including mental illness and same-sex relationships, are threaded through the narrative.

As Puts had not heard the historic recording of Woolf’s voice, maybe it was intuition that led him to write the role for a mezzo-soprano. The lower pitch of the voice promises to reincarnate an important facet of Woolf’s personality.

“I have a lot of contrast in Virginia Woolf’s music,” says Puts. “At first, it is more intimate, when she is in her studio, and the harmony is constantly closing in on itself. Maybe I was thinking of her stream of consciousness style of writing, going from one thought to another, so there is a sense of the harmony doing the same. Then there are sudden manic episodes, when she is describing London and how she longs for the excitement of the city.”

Drawing on its pulling-power, the Metropolitan Opera has cast the roles of the three women with three star singers. Joyce DiDonato will play Virginia Woolf, Renée Fleming is Clarissa Vaughan and Kelli O’Hara, whose career straddles Broadway and opera, is Laura Brown. They take the roles played in the film by Nicole Kidman (Woolf), Meryl Streep (Vaughan) and Julianne Moore (Brown).

The presence of Fleming in the cast has attracted huge attention, especially in the US. Now that she has relinquished most or all of her standard operatic roles, any appearance by the leading American soprano of her generation brings with it a prized cachet.

Puts had been composing a new piece for Fleming based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s letters when she suggested the subject of The Hours. Fleming had been spending time with Julianne Moore and the idea of the opera grew out of that. Puts says he was immediately attracted by the possibilities in the book, especially the three timeframes inhabited by the main characters.

“Music allows for simultaneity beyond any other medium,” he says. “In a book or a film these three stories can’t really exist at the same time. An opera composer cannot only have the characters on stage together, but even singing simultaneously, and that makes sense because harmony works that way. The connection lies in the emotional lives of the three women, though it is quite elusive, like a different dimension where they meet in their shared experiences. As Virginia writes Mrs Dalloway she seems to be controlling what is happening to the fate of Clarissa, while Laura clings to the same book because she feels alienated by the idyll of domestic American life.”

That alienation is an aspect of the novel that has fascinated Puts. “I find it compelling that these three women are all trapped in an existence which is not comfortable for them, so each is in some way living an inauthentic life. The idea that you cannot be yourself has always been a powerful theme to me. I am not sure why, and I haven’t psychoanalysed myself, but it is something I clung to as I wrote this opera. I want the emotional situations of these three women to be felt powerfully by the audience.”

At 50, Puts has the experience to deliver a major new work at a high-profile venue. His first opera, Silent Night, about a Christmas truce on the battlefield during the first world war, has gone on to performances throughout the US and beyond, including the Wexford Festival in Ireland and Opera North in the UK.

After the wide-ranging music of Silent Night, the musical language in The Hours is said to be more focused — though the three contrasting time periods will each have its own atmosphere. Puts describes his music generally as being accessible, often with a cinematic quality, and always rooted in the needs of the drama.

The plan for the Metropolitan Opera to give the premiere of The Hours goes right back to Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s first meeting after he knew he was to be announced as the company’s music director in 2016. “The foremost element of Kevin’s music is how vocal it is,” Nézet-Séguin says, “especially how he strikes a balance between what needs to be conversational and what is lyrical. Few understand the human voice as well as he does. That is what Renée Fleming told me some years ago when he wrote a piece for her.”

Nézet-Séguin is committed to bringing new operas to the Met, not just contemporary works that have already been tried out elsewhere, like Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice last year, but also premieres. He says premieres such as The Hours are important, as the great resources available to the Met can influence other companies to follow its lead.

“I value operas of our time and conducted two of the three [contemporary operas] last year myself,” he says. “After Brett Dean’s Hamlet, which is not an easy piece, we have shown the Met is a house where all kinds of operas should appear. There have been eight premieres since 1950. Let’s see eight now in a decade.”

November 22-December 15, metopera.org