This almost falls under the "now I've heard everything" category: England's Royal Opera has commissioned composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and librettist Richard Thomas to create an opera based on the life of former Playboy centerfold and two-legged train wreck Anna Nicole Smith.
I especially appreciate this quote:
"It is not going to be a horrible, sleazy evening," Elaine Padmore, Covent Garden's director of opera told the Guardian. "It is not going to be tawdry; it is going to be witty, clever, thoughtful and sad.
The Guardian's full story is here:
Read the story: Anna Nicole the Opera
And Guardian columnist Charlotte Higgins opines that, given the plots of most operas, Anna Nicole Smith's story is relatively tame.
"Anna Nicole Smith's well-known biography is lurid, but frankly no more lurid than a great many opera plots. Take Janacek's 'Jenufa' (1904), based on Gabriela Preissova's play about contemporary Moravian rural society. The heroine is stabbed in the face, abandoned by the lover who has made her pregnant, and the resultant baby is murdered by her stepmother. Or 'Don Giovanni' – it starts with a graphically enacted rape, for Heaven's sake, and it ends with the perpetrator being sucked into the flames of Hell. Or 'Lulu' -- Berg's heroine could almost be a kind of model for Anna Nicole Smith, a vampish creature by turns victim and monster, who works her way through lovers of both genders before being killed in a London hotel room by Jack the Ripper."
To that list you could add just about any Puccini opera -- "Tosca" is has its share of luridness, complete with a murder committed on stage; the bloody tragedy of "Madama Butterfly," to name just two.
The Santa Fe Opera this summer will present the world premiere of "The Letter," with a score by Pultizer Prize winning composer Paul Moravec and a libretto by critic and biographer Terry Teachout, that is based on Somerset Maugham's play -- that opens with a woman emptying a revolver in the general direction of the man she loves (and who isn't the man to whom she's married).
Opera trafficks in out-sized emotions, out-sized stories. And Ms. Smith -- in just about every way -- could certainly be described as "out-sized."
Now the real question -- who should sing the title role when this hot biscuit hits the Covent Garden stage in 2011?
