Review: ‘Breaking the Waves’ Lends Musical Heft to a von Trier Tale

Kiera Duffy in “Breaking the Waves,” Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s adaptation of Lars von Trier 1996 film. Credit Mark Makela for The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — If opera is the art of emotional extremity, few subjects are as operatic as “Breaking the Waves,” the 1996 Lars von Trier film that has been adapted by the composer Missy Mazzoli and the librettist Royce Vavrek. Its doomed protagonist endures trials at least the equal of Tosca’s or Madama Butterfly’s.

A fervently devout young woman living on the remote Isle of Skye in Scotland, Bess McNeill undergoes a sexual awakening when she marries Jan Nyman, a handsome oil rig worker. But after he’s paralyzed in an accident on the rig, he presses her to have sex with other men and tell him about the experience, setting her on the road to ruin in their tight-knit, deeply religious community.

The film is a febrile wonder, marked by a burning, wide-eyed performance by Emily Watson as Bess, a modern Joan of Arc who comes to believe her husband’s demands as God’s will. The ambitious, accomplished, dramatically direct opera, a co-commission of Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects that had its premiere here on Thursday, is grander and more impersonal — and also distinguished by its Bess, the fearless, focused soprano Kiera Duffy .

“Breaking the Waves,” Ms. Mazzoli’s first full-length opera, is a substantial step forward from her turgid 2012 chamber work, “Songs From the Uproar.” Harmonies seethe and drone at the base of the new score, as implacable yet changeable as the omnipresent sea.

Nervous fragments are scattered throughout like ripples and swells atop an ocean, for an overall orchestral texture that’s moody, yet with a clean neutrality that elegantly sets off the vocal lines that soar above it, rather than competing with them.

If Mr. Vavrek’s libretto is talky and often stolid — “Your body is a map,” Bess sings, “each hair a mountain, each rib a loch” — the plot comes across and Ms. Mazzoli sets the language with passionate clarity. (This was also the achievement of the singers’ crisp diction and the subtle balances overseen by the conductor Steven Osgood.)

Newsletter Sign Up

Thank you for subscribing.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Writing for an orchestra of just 15 players, Ms. Mazzoli confidently creates a range of densities, from symphonic weightiness to agile sparseness. In a series of split-personality dialogues with God — think of Gollum in “Lord of the Rings” — Bess swerves between righteousness and remorse: passages that Ms. Mazzoli shoots through with wailing electric guitar and menacing choral chant. The effect is different from Mr. von Trier’s harrowing intimacy, but it has its own vividness.

While Ms. Duffy, often nearly naked and singing with the cool roundedness of melting ice, creates a subtly ambivalent portrait of a woman both self-important and persecuted, the opera’s other characters are less persuasive. Jan (John Moore) is a cipher, as is Bess’s loyal sister-in-law, Dodo (Eve Gigliotti), who is something like Emilia, Desdemona’s confidant in Verdi’s “Otello,” but without that character’s crucial dramatic function.

Dodo and Jan both seem strangely extraneous to the conflict most central for Ms. Mazzoli and Mr. Vavrek: that between Bess and the crowd that uses and rejects her. (A more radical operatic rethinking of the film could have been scored for solo soprano and chorus alone.)

James Darrah’s staging makes this standoff memorably stark. On a set of looming walls and fractured beams, his excellent chorus shifts from rig workers to churchgoers to brutal lovers with smooth, telling costume changes — as Bess wanders, nearly mad, from scene to scene.

It is not easy to find new operas that command attention, tell their story lucidly and create a powerful, permeating mood. Dark and daring, “Breaking the Waves” does all this with sensitivity and style.

“Breaking the Waves” runs through Saturday at the Perelman Theater; operaphila.org.

A version of this review appears in print on September 26, 2016, on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: In a Take on von Trier, a Soprano to Remember. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe