New York City Opera has commissioned American composer Charles Wuorinen to write an opera based on “Brokeback Mountain,” a love story about two U.S. ranch-hands that won three Oscars when it was turned into a movie.
The opera house’s spokesman Gerard Mortier said in a statement on Sunday that Wuorinen had accepted an invitation to compose an opera entitled Haroun and the Sierra of Sissies, based on Annie Proulx‘s short story. It is slated to premiere during City Opera’s 2013 spring season in a production by Jonathan Miller. Casting for the work will include Ian Bostridge as Ennis del Mar and Shirtless Nathan Gunn as Jack Twist. Sylvain Cambreling, not shirtless, will conduct.
In preparation for the first performances of the opera five years hence, New York Times scribe Anthony Tommasini has already begun a weekly series of essays in which he posits a moral equivalence between the violent lynching of homosexuals with “the patronizing disdain of the tough-guy [dodecaphonic] modernists” against the oppressed minority of 20th century composers who used tonal methods.
Later in the series Tommasini will explain why the Haroun and the Sierra of Sissies should have been written by Thomas Adès in the first place.
