Nico Muhly: "Marnie" and Artistic Intent

Having Nico speak to forum was a real treat for me – as you may recall, his Mothertongue was my selection for our “one minute of music” presentation last semester. There were many great these he spoke about, including managing a large workload, his musical aesthetics, building a website with "not-boring" headshots, and overviews of some of his recent works. Having seen Marnie recently, I was particularly excited to hear about this. To be perfectly honest, I have never found opera musically appealing, but when I saw Marnie open at the Met this past October, I was completely fascinated. Many things struck me about this work and left me curious to how Nico made these decisions. Luckily, he touched on most of them in his presentation.

Musically and conceptually, the Shadow Marnies were a highlight of the entire production. In a genre marked by its heavy vibrato, to hear the opposite extreme on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera was extremely refreshing. After watching, my assumption was that the straight-tone singing was simply an aesthetic choice (and perhaps it partially was), but it was interesting to hear that it was also a practical decision to separate them from the other singers as being from “another world”. While I don’t expect opera to become a straight-tone genre anytime soon, I do wonder if it will gain any traction. I understand the bel canto style has practical use in terms of projection and strain, but I also find it do be what makes so many people steer clear of the genre. If a composer as successful as Nico Muhly struggles to get his performers on board, will lesser known composers be able to negotiate? Will his success in using this technique give other composers leverage in adopting this sound?

Something that initially bothered me about the production was that Marnie’s [spoiler alert] attempted rapist / forced husband is often presented as a good guy. He’s given beautiful songs with sweet texts, which musically attracts the audience to him. I found myself having to remind myself of his actions to avoid liking him at times. While Nico did not speak on this in class, I did ask him about this character treatment afterwards. Nico claims that he and his collaborators deliberately made this character likeable to force the audience to struggle with their emotions. If they had kept him in a negative light the entire time, it wouldn’t take any thought to dislike him. By giving him attractive characteristics, audience members must decide for themselves that he’s a bad person. In fact, they have to make these rationalizations about most characters in the opera—everyone is morally ambiguous, including Marnie.

This feels much more like real life than a traditional Mozart opera where each character is a caricature of good or evil. However, this can pose a problem for artists: when we shed an ambiguous light on characters in this manner, many people interpret it as us being personally forgiving of them. Several reviews of Marnie claimed it was too forgiving, and even I felt this way until I heard Nico’s explanation. So how do we walk the line of clear intent and intellectually challenging our audience? Perhaps that’s what makes each of our artistic voices unique.