When The Hours, a new opera by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Greg Pierce, had its world stage premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in November 2022, no one was surprised that it sold well; it featured the stellar trio of soprano Renée Fleming, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, and Broadway star Kelli O’Hara in the three central roles. The surprise was the overwhelmingly positive audience response to the piece, which prompted the Met to schedule The Hours in its upcoming season as well, something almost unheard of with a new opera.
For Fleming, who developed the concept of pairing the subject and the composer, it’s part of a personal mission to help create new work on contemporary topics that resonate for current audiences. “The art form needs to catch up to the era,” she says. “It’s important to see things at the Met that show issues such as AIDS and the various sexualities explored in The Hours.”
When the opera returns to the stage in May 2024 it is certain to sell out again, but you can enjoy The Hours right now at the best of all possible prices — free — on Friday, March 17, courtesy of the PBS Great Performances series on KNME. It launches the 10-broadcast 2023 season of Metropolitan Opera performances, which runs through Dec. 10, with an appealing slate of familiar and less well-known titles.
The opera is based on Michael Cunningham’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name and on the 2002 film starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman. It weaves together the stories of three women from different time periods who share a connection through Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway, which uses a shifting narrative viewpoint and subconscious thoughts in depicting “a woman’s whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day, her whole life,” as Cunningham wrote. (See the sidebar for more information about Woolf and her novel.)
Composer Kevin Puts, photo David White
The central characters are Virginia Woolf (DiDonato), who in 1923 is suffering from depression as she tries to write Mrs. Dalloway; Laura Brown (O’Hara), a pregnant housewife in 1949 Los Angeles who is reading the novel; and Clarissa Vaughan (Fleming), a New York City editor who seems to be living out its plot in 1999 as she plans a party for a close friend dying of AIDS.
Working in a stage form gave Puts and Pierce opportunities to put the three women onstage simultaneously, something which couldn’t be achieved in the film and the novel. “In a way that is only possible through music, the lines between the stories gradually begin to blur,” Puts wrote at the time of the opera’s premiere. “Their worlds come together and apart, and we get these duets and trios which essentially transcend time.”
Advancing the careers of composers whose music hits “that sweet spot between absolutely quality and accessibility” is also one of Fleming’s priorities. “Kevin really nailed it with The Hours,” she says. “One of the things I’m most proud of was bringing him to the Met.”
One of the opera’s most successful aspects is the use of the chorus to voice the main characters’ inner lives, echoing Woolf’s impressionistic prose techniques. (“It’s the way we live our lives,” Fleming points out, “with a constant running subconscious stream of thought.”)
Another is the The Hours’ finale, which evokes Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. As Zachary Woolfe described it in his New York Times review, Strauss’ “sublime final trio is rendingly recalled in The Hours, as Clarissa, Laura and Virginia at last acknowledge one another, joining in sober then swelling harmony. It’s a superb sequence, a nod to Strauss that has a sweet longing all its own.”
Asked whether it was daunting to follow Meryl Streep as Clarissa Vaughan, Fleming laughingly replies, “For me the most intimidating role was Blanche DuBois [in the operatic version of A Streetcar Named Desire]. What I learned from that is that the music changes the game, it adds an element so it’s not such a blank page. I’ve done some theater roles, and it’s very exposed. Speaking words into the silence can be terrifying.”
Kelli O’Hara, Renée Fleming, and Joyce DiDonato in The Hours; photo Evan Zimmerman, courtesy Metropolitan Opera
The Hours marked Fleming’s return to the Met after a seven-year hiatus. She says the rehearsal process was a joyful experience and that opening night was both thrilling and thought-provoking. “Being back with the audience, hearing a live orchestra, and working with all these great colleagues was a fantastic metaphor for what should be happening with our society and our leaders.”
The national schedule for subsequent Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Great Performances is Verdi’s La Traviata, April 2; Giordano’s Fedora, May 7; Cherubini’s Medea, June 16; Wagner’s Lohengrin, July 9; Verdi’s Falstaff, Aug. 6; Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, Sept. 10; Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Oct. 1; Terence Blanchard’s Champion, Nov. 5; and Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Dec. 10. Check newmexicopbs.org as the broadcast dates approach to confirm the date and time of the local broadcasts.
