Taking in Two Boys can feel like an exercise in compartmentalized perception. You may find yourself simultaneously following the storyline of a bluntly told police procedural (while putting the music altogether to one side); running your eyes down a series of displayed computer screens (and in doing so tending to blot out everything else going on); tracking, amid the momentary tableaux of a constantly reconfigured set with dozens of video projections, the coming and goings of characters whose degree of actual as opposed to virtual existence is always in doubt (and, while admiring that stagecraft, thinking back irresistibly to earlier eras of symbolist and expressionist theater, as if you might be attending a new show by Gordon Craig or Erwin Piscator), and above (or more properly beneath) all, listening intently to layers of music that overlap, in isolated parallel tracks, without ever quite joining up. Solo voices exchange recitatives; a chorus simulates a sea-surge of lost unidentifiable voices; the orchestra, in a realm of pure oblivious form, executes patterns of mercurial loveliness.

In the end I had the haunting impression of having overheard a great deal of absorbing music pertaining to some other opera existing beyond this one, in a sort of sonic Neverland toward which these lost boys can only faintly reach. At moments I was further distracted by intrusive recollections of the letter scene in Eugene Onegin, performed by Anna Netrebko on the same stage a week earlier. Tatiana, alone at a desk, pouring out her longings in a protracted and endlessly revised letter to Onegin, became an unlikely ancestor of Brian, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of Two Boys, engaging with a succession of ghostly interlocutors in chat rooms. It was interesting to think of Onegin as being partly an opera about media—about translating the act of someone writing words on paper into a musical and dramatic structure that conveys not merely the content of the letter but the desperate energy compelling her to write it and the oppressive solitude in which she does so.

But such a love letter, written in such an era, would already aspire toward aria. It is hard to imagine anything less songlike than the terse and truncated utterances of an anonymous Internet chat room, or indeed of an environment less suggestive of music than the Internet itself. The Net’s openness to an infinity of destinations seems to encourage a mood of disembodiment and isolation, at least as rendered in this opera. (Some future Rossini or Lehár may take a more buoyant tack in charting comical delights and madcap mix-ups in unanticipated online hook-ups.) Two Boys challenges itself to find music in that multiconnected zone of disconnection. The premise here—the inexplicable stabbing of a young boy by a slightly older boy he met online—is altogether grim, an anecdote (apparently, as they say in movies, “based on a true story”) that could almost serve as a cautionary tale for parents wary of their children’s computer use. The parents here are as clueless as they can be, unsurprisingly since we are at the turn of the twenty-first century, that remote period, in an implicitly drab and emotionally worn-out English urban milieu.

The preliminary scrim of blurry surveillance footage sets the glum tone well enough, a tone that is sustained as we watch a melancholy policewoman, Detective Inspector Strawson (Alice Coote), begin her investigation of the stabbing. But the gritty realities of police station and hospital room represent only one layer in Michael Yeargan’s intricately conceived and frequently shifting set design, in which multiple strata are superimposed: the virtual space at center stage where chat-room voices assume physical form; the wide pillars on which fragments of digitized language (among them well-publicized instances of on-line cajolery, stalking, bullying, and children being driven to suicide) stream, coalesce, and break apart into cosmic cloudbursts; the shadowy recesses where a chorus evokes the ocean of ceaseless electronic communication that Brian (Paul Appleby) has plugged into.

It would be unfair to apply the old derogatory joke about Broadway musicals where you walk out humming the sets, but both the production design and Bartlett Sher’s sharply imagined direction do contribute enormously to the effectiveness of Two Boys. There is a commanding visual life to the proceedings, even if the interwoven choreography often seems like gratuitous busyness, a punctuation device to keep things moving, crowding an already crowded stage. The fundamental problem of an opera about the Internet is where it is shown to be taking place—in a room, on a screen, in the mind of the user, in a nano-universe of electron atoms? Represented symbolically onstage, the Net takes on a mythic and dreamlike aura, as a portal to realms where ordinary logic and limitations do not apply. For the unformed, virginal Brian—a character so malleable as to be unknowable, especially to himself—the computer screen is the ritual space where desire and terror materialize in the form of chat-room dialogue.

As we see these texts blown up at the sides of stage (a neat way to incorporate supertitles directly into the work) the same dialogue is sung by Brian and the four apparitions who lead him—by way of a skein of ominous conspiracy, horrific threats and crimes, and disturbing sexual temptation—to the point of stabbing a thirteen-year-old boy he has met only once before. There is a mystery here, spelled out as baldly as a television episode, and its unraveling by Inspector Strawson is the libretto’s through-line. In following it we are also given in broad strokes a glimpse of her own discontented life, of caring for an ailing mother and nursing regrets over the child she gave up for adoption, who is now the same age as Brian: a back story contrived for clear enough dramatic purposes but no less contrived for that.

The inspector’s adult world is without color or satisfaction, a destination that no child in his right mind would want to arrive at. Its music is likewise curt and functional. The grown-ups are scarcely capable of emotional statement, and it is only as Strawson becomes initiated into Brian’s strange and tormented digital world that she begins to express feeling vocally, right up to the final passage in which she seems to be making a direct appeal to the audience to make contact with the pain that has been laid bare. On the inspector falls the burden of clarifying a meaningful reaction to the otherwise bizarre and borderline experiences Brian undergoes at the hands of his shadowy online acquaintances, experiences that range from coercion into webcam masturbation to recruitment to murder on the orders of a seductive secret agent (beautifully sung by Sandra Piques Eddy). Those acquaintances—who emerge in a series of separate numbers, like so many vaudeville acts—are ultimately exposed as the masks, or ventriloquist’s dummies, of a single precocious and troubled mind.
Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

That mind belongs to the only character who does more than react, even if his actions are violently self-destructive. When finally revealed, he is sung by a boy soprano (the very effective Andrew Pulver) whose choir-boy voice cuts through everything else, the sound of a bedeviled innocence sensing its power with a mix of dread and longing. We have heard his voice before early in the opera, at an Anglican service at which both boys are present, the traces of liturgy offering a vestige of an earlier culture that once offered a brick-and-mortar place in which people communed in the presence of something larger than themselves. Nico Muhly’s devotion to English Renaissance choral music—evident in his recorded arrangements of compositions by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons—is audible here and at other moments in a score that bears traces of influences from Anton Webern to Philip Glass, while giving constant evidence of Muhly’s own gift for texture and timbre.

Oddly, the opera’s least expressive music are the parts sung by individual characters. This is arguably perfectly in keeping with the work’s intentions—all these characters are in one way or another frustrated, repressed, cowed, inarticulate—but the effect is of a lyric impulse deliberately curtailed, blunted, held back. Any vibrant sense of individuality seems to have abandoned this world. Brian, the central figure, is caught somewhere between yearning and despondency, incapable of the brightness of invention as he finds himself subject to the entreaties of phantasmal entities. When asked finally to explain what drove him to act he can only reply: “I don’t know…I don’t know” in a phrase that loops around like a circle with no exit. The much richer music for chorus and orchestra does not simply underscore the main action but provides a hint of something wider and deeper than the constricted catastrophe in the foreground. That chorus might be an interconnecting hive-mind feeling its way toward an as yet undelivered illumination; or perhaps simply the collective sound made by a myriad isolated voices as they pulsate in response to obscure desires and obscure hurts.

Nico Muhly has a voice, a Muhly sound, and it came through consistently in his opera “Two Boys,” a dark, ambitious and innovative work that had its much-anticipated American premiere on Monday night at the Metropolitan Opera. With a libretto by the acclaimed playwright Craig Lucas, the opera tells a story, based on real-life events 10 years ago in Manchester, England, of a 16-year-old boy who nearly killed a younger boy, egged on, the attacker claimed, by mysterious people he encountered in a chat room on the Internet.

Commissioned by the Met, “Two Boys” was given its premiere in London in a coproduction with the English National Opera in 2011 and was significantly revised for New York. The director Bartlett Sher’s staging, which employs inventive projections and animation from 59 Productions, is suitably fluid, ominous and shadowy. The dreamlike set by Michael Yeargan consists of movable black walls that slide into positions and double as projection screens.

Mr. Muhly, just 32, is the youngest composer ever commissioned by the Met. Prior to “Two Boys,” during the James Levine era of more than 40 years, there were only five commissioned operas at the Met. Mr. Muhly’s work originated in the company’s troubled commissioning partnership with the Lincoln Center Theater, begun in 2006. It is the first to make it to a production. So there was inordinate pressure on “Two Boys” to be a success. It must have been deeply gratifying for Mr. Lucas and, especially, Mr. Muhly to receive such an ardent ovation at the end.

I wish I could say that “Two Boys” is that longed-for success. The score, rich with intriguing harmonies and textural intricacy, shimmers in Mr. Muhly’s vivid, subtle orchestration, especially as conducted by the impressive David Robertson. Mr. Muhly has acknowledged many musical influences, including Britten, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, his mentor Philip Glass and even certain complex modernists. With his keen ear, Mr. Muhly is able to fold these inspirations into his own style.

But having a compositional voice is not enough in the elusive form of musical drama that is opera. The score does not sufficiently penetrate the complex emotions and shocking interactions between the characters in this story, set in 2001. Mr. Muhly excels at conveying the obsessive world of Internet chat rooms, a bazaar of masked identities, sexual yearning and fantasies. Several gripping choral episodes depict a frenetic multiplicity of young people mesmerized by their laptops as they communicate. The choristers sing multilayered babble: catchphrases of conversation in chat lingo; sputtering repetitions of “u there u there” delivered like mumbled mantras; collages of muttered phone numbers.

In London, these choral episodes were thought to be musically engrossing but dramatically inert: with rows of people just staring at laptops. For this staging a roster of dancers has been added, choreographed by Hofesh Shechter. As the choristers sing, the dancers writhe and twist, all undulant slouching with jerky gyrations. The idea is to convey the teeming emotions beneath the numbing chat. I found the dancing distracting and a little forced.

“Two Boys” unfolds like a police procedural. The main character is Anne Strawson, a detective inspector charged with figuring out why the older teenager, here called Brian, stabbed the 13-year-old, Jake, who is comatose in the hospital. Anne’s character was fleshed out after the London premiere and given a more revealing back story. A hard-working, frustrated woman in her 50s, Anne lives with her invalid mother and is loath to face her loneliness. She is essentially computer-illiterate, which is a hard to believe of a detective in 2001. But she is mainly reluctant to take on this case because a boy she gave up at birth for adoption would be the same age as Brian.

The excellent mezzo-soprano Alice Coote sings Anne, and her rich, mellow sound and expressive directness are ideal for the role. Still, there are significant stretches of her part where, over lapping riffs and churning figures in the orchestra, which reveal Mr. Muhly’s debt to Minimalism, Anne sings slow-moving, intoned vocal lines that come across as stiff and plodding. Mr. Muhly too often conveys the drama through murmuring, ritualized episodes rather than activating the words and altering the approach to the vocal writing. I wanted more bursts of conversational dialogue to alternate with the flights of searching lyricism.

The impressive, youthful tenor Paul Appleby gives his all to the role of Brian, a young man struggling with his sexuality who feels oppressed by his well-meaning parents (here Maria Zifchak and Kyle Pfortmiller) and seeks refuge in chat rooms where he can connect with other rootless youths and be what they want him to be. The person who first draws him into the world of Jake is actually Jake’s older sister Rebecca, a tough-taking temptress, sung here with brash coolness by the soprano Jennifer Zetlan.

Though Jake does have an older sister, she is a mousy, young woman who keeps running away from home. It turns out that the lonely, gay and hurting Jake made up the story and surrounded himself with a roster of manipulating figures, including a sexually bold Rebecca, a maniacal “Aunt” Fiona (Sandra Piques Eddy) and a depraved and dangerous gardener, Peter (Keith Miller).

Anne, the detective, finally realizes that Jake lured Brian into carrying out the horrific attack. Both the music and Mr. Lucas’s libretto are fairly convincing at taking us inside the mind of the troubled Jake with his suicidal wish. And it is poignant to see two personifications of Jake. There is the idealized teenager, a lonely, good-looking young man who seeks a romantic connection online, sung here by the boyish and solid baritone Christopher Bolduc in his Met debut; then there is the actual Jake, a timid, nervous, nerdy 13-year-old, sung achingly by the boy soprano Andrew Pulver.

But the opera never satisfactorily illuminates what drives Brian to go so far as to stab Jake viciously. Whole stretches of Brian’s music are impulsive and dynamic. He seems too aware and decent to be manipulated into murdering a boy.

To his credit, Mr. Muhly has avoided the obvious in this score. There is none of the cheap melodrama of Neo-Romantic musical styles that you hear too often in new operas. Mr. Muhly’s musical world in this work is dreamy, hazy and strange. There are wondrous passages, especially the final choral scene with all the main characters, invented and real, taking part, ethereal and shimmering music, reminiscent of a strange church chorale, but with jabs of dissonance. Yet, the dramatic denouement does not feel earned. We are left baffled by this disturbing story.

Overall, though, this was a worthy project for the Met. The subject of the opera is topical and important, though anything about the Internet is in danger of becoming dated quickly. Chat rooms are already kind of passé.

“Two Boys” runs at the Metropolitan Opera through November 14, 212 362-6000, metopera.org

Attempting to pigeonhole the thirty-one-year-old composer may incite that same futile feeling music appreciators get when trying to ID the Tristan chord. To survey his output is to look at genre in a funhouse mirror. His most prominent work to date is heard again this month, when Two Boys makes its North American debut at the Met on October 21. Muhly’s second opera, Dark Sisters, was unveiled at New York’s Gotham Chamber Opera in 2011, four months after Two Boys had its world premiere at English National Opera (where it took the stage in a co-production with the Met).

Standard fare, so far. But consider Muhly’s early, non-linear foray into opera, a 2009 work titled Green Aria: A ScentOpera, presented as part of the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, which funneled Christophe Laudamiel-designed perfumes to audience members as they listened to Muhly’s music. Muhly’s ballet commissions include From Here On Out at American Ballet Theater, Triade at the Paris Opera Ballet, One Thing Leads to Another at the Dutch National Ballet and Two Hearts at New York City Ballet — all four choreographed by Benjamin Millepied. And then there are the Decca recordings, Seeing Is Believing and A Good Understanding.

Looking further afield, we find Muhly’s name on the other side of the classical fence, firmly planted in pop music. The composer has worked with transgender singer Antony Hegarty; Brooklyn-based (and self-professing “indie”) rock band Grizzly Bear; singer/songwriter Bonnie “Prince” Billy; DJ/producer Diplo; and Jónsi Birgisson, frontman of the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós. Look closer, and Muhly’s collaborations start to get institutional again — Muhly playing the piano for Björk’s 2004 album Medúlla and conducting on 2007’s Volta, arranging songs on Rufus Wainwright’s 2007 Release the Stars and arranging string parts for last year’s Climax by R&B/hip-hop singer (and American household name) Usher. Then there are the movie soundtracks — to name a few, The Reader (2008), Margaret (2011) and the Sundance-vetted, Daniel Radcliffe-as-Allen Ginsberg-vessel Kill Your Darlings, due in movie theaters this month.

According to Muhly, the concept of genre may be altogether moot. “Genre doesn’t matter anymore. It stopped mattering when record stores closed. Genre is just, essentially, ‘What aisle of the supermarket is it in?’ It’s a taxonomy that’s very useful for dead things. It’s a taxonomy that’s very useful for things that are no longer being actually made or revised.” Then, as he often seems to in conversation, he qualifies his statement with a burst of summary that’s as irreverent as it is funny: “It’s fine to say, ‘Bach is Baroque.’ Do you know what I mean? That’s okay. Because he dead.”

Bach is playing in Muhly’s apartment when we meet in late April. The apartment seems to reflect Muhly’s personality: it shows off good taste (it’s open and clean, and large windows look out over the treetops of the Sara D. Roosevelt Park) but also a lack of pretense (it’s close to fragrant outdoor markets in Chinatown, which Muhly says he prefers to Whole Foods). Bach’s music factors into a long list of the composer’s influences, a list that spans about 400 years of music. “My love for Thomas Weelkes, especially, was like a childish celebrity infatuation,” Muhly wrote in an article for the Guardian in 2007. John Taverner, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons also contribute to Muhly’s taste, works from the latter two appearing alongside four Muhly pieces on the album Seeing Is Believing. Then there are composers from more recent decades. He talks fondly of Benjamin Britten, whose scores sit prominently on a shelf near Muhly’s workstation. He even exhibits a pair of light-blue Britten–Peter Pears cufflinks (a silhouette of one artist for each cuff) that a friend brought him from Aldeburgh. The music of John Adams has exerted an undeniable influence on Muhly’s compositions; the electric violin part in Seeing Is Believing harkens back to Adams’s Dharma at Big Sur; Triade is redolent of Adams’s Harmonielehre; even Two Boys has, at times of crisis in the story, a flush of brass and percussion similar to what we hear in Adams’s Doctor Atomic.

Muhly’s mentor is minimalism’s other great opera-composer, Philip Glass. “I started working for Philip a million years ago, when I was eighteen,” says Muhly, “sort of editing manuscripts and whatever. I did that and just kind of never left.” As an eighteen-year-old, Muhly also enrolled in the prestigious Barnard–Columbia–Juilliard Exchange, earning degrees from Columbia and Juilliard in five years. At Juilliard, Muhly studied composition with Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano, and at Columbia, he earned a degree in English literature. Don’t ask which English novel Muhly plans to convert to opera. “As of yet, I’m not 155% convinced that a great book is going to be a great opera. Mainly, that’s because my relationship with books is language-based and not plot-based.”

Language served as the catalyst for Two Boys. “I was first interested in [the story] on a linguistic level — how it is, at the age of thirteen or whatever, that you can command different language spaces.” The teenager he refers to comes from a news story in Manchester, England, from the early 2000s. Two boys, who were never identified due to their ages, fourteen and sixteen, were embroiled in what a British court later dubbed an “extraordinary suicide attempt” — the younger manipulating the older with false internet-chatroom personalities. “It just felt like the most modern version of a very old tragedy, which is why I felt that it was severely operatic — aside from the fact that what this little kid did was essentially write an opera. He has the teen girl, he has the kind of bass-baritone-y scary gardener dude, he has the sexy policewoman — there’s all these different kind of stock characters that could be out of Puccini.”

At the outset of the opera, Jake, the younger boy, has been stabbed in the heart. Detective Investigator Anne Strawson (in the style of Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison) has detained Brian, the older boy, as a suspect. Brian recalls how he became enmeshed in Jake’s life via the internet — first meeting his teen sister, Rebecca; then his spymaster aunt, Fiona; then his rapist gardener, Peter. There’s a subplot involving D.I. Strawson and her child; Jake and Brian eventually meet; D.I. Strawson finds the proof she needs on one of the boys’ computers. To realize the opera, which calls for instantaneous scene changes as Brian travels back and forth between interrogation and flashback, the production relies heavily on the lighting designs of Donald Holder, who joins his frequent colleagues Michael Yeargan (sets) and Catherine Zuber (costumes). For continuity between scene changes, director Bartlett Sher uses D.I. Strawson as a constant presence — much the same way as the muse is used in Les Contes d’Hoffmann — and as a reminder of Brian’s interrogation. To animate the chatroom scenes, which Brian mostly recalls while seated behind a laptop, projections were designed by Fifty Nine Productions, the same studio credited in Muhly’s Dark Sisters, Satyagraha at ENO and the Met, War Horse at the National Theatre and Lincoln Center Theater, and the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London. “The Fifty Nine boys are sort of the mind bank of the show. They had slightly different anxieties about how to design it so it doesn’t look so contemporary, and so it looks a little clunky in the way of the early internet. The thing is, it doesn’t really bother me that much, because they also wouldn’t have been singing.”

If you think suspending disbelief about internet chatrooms sounds dubious, Muhly will argue that you’re wrong. “One of the things that is specific about Two Boys is that I think we make it very clear that the internet is a delivery system for the same thing that happens in Giulio Cesare or in Partenope or in any of these operas where people pretend to be somewhere else.We suspend disbelief in opera about costume, not just on a theatrical level but on a plot level, all the time. Like the point of Così — and those people were in real life! Right? And we’re meant to believe those women are like, ‘Oh these handsome Albanians!’ It’s actually not that big of a leap. All of opera is riddled with people misbehaving towards usually a sexual or political goal.”

Like the internet, Two Boys is loaded with sex. Implied sex acts have plenty of precedence on the opera stage (e.g. Don Giovanni, Semele), but Met audiences will get a little more description than usual when Craig Lucas’s libretto flashes across the Met Titles. “How’s my favorite young stud doing?” sings the character American Congressman during an Act I choral number, as the accompanying bass section sings “Do it face down kneeling, kneeling completely naked.” In Act II, Brian sings, “He sort of blew me,” under interrogation. A scene in which Brian and Rebecca flirt with each other results in one of the rare instances of masturbation in opera; as reviewer Anna Picard wrote in 2011 in the Independent, “[Brian] frets and sweats and wanks heroically to a video cam.”

The premiere of Two Boys received a mixed response from the British press. Met audiences, however, won’t necessarily see what occurred at English National Opera. “The process of this piece has been that we did two workshop things before the ENO and another afterwards. There are a couple of different timing and pacing things that you really don’t learn until you get on the stage. Even in rehearsal there was stuff. We had a luxurious amount of time at ENO in a rehearsal room with our set — it was great. But, as it turns out, when you get onstage and you run it for the first time, you’re like, ‘Oh, okay, now I see all the things that have to happen.’ We were like, ‘Okay, what we need to do is flip two things — basically put the beginning of Act II in the beginning of Act I — and then see where things settle as a result of that information shift.’ To me, it was more editorial, and less deeply compositional.

“When I was writing Two Boys, I was obsessed with Death in Venice and how [Britten] incorporates these gamelan scales into it. For me, the last eight bars of Death in Venice are this magical — he was very sick when he wrote it — otherworldly thing. So I actually stole a lot of that. There’s a part at the end of the opera when you see that the younger boy is finally asking — he’s asking to be killed. It’s a quote of the last eight bars of Death in Venice, but it’s also got this wild, de-tuned gamelan effect. It’s gongs, it’s celeste, it’s harp, it’s de-tuned horn, it’s natural harmonics and strings that are a little bit flat.”

In a certain sense, Two Boys is a bit of a musical departure for Muhly. The soundscapes of his operas seem to have left behind the over-caffeinated quality that colors much of his work. Skip Town, for instance, which Muhly still performs often in concert, consists of a frenetic piano part played alongside a frenetic piano recording. “Part III (The 8th Tone),” on Muhly’s newest recording, Drones, practically trips over itself with enthusiasm, the way an excited dog might run. Muhly’s 2005 “A Hudson Cycle” for solo piano has this quality too; it’s a melancholy piece, and when the twitch appears, it’s more subdued, internal rather than external, like a heart fibrillation. Rather than jerks — to use the physics term — Muhly operas accelerate more evenly. We hear driving, tuneful minimalism from the orchestra and the chorus, which builds into a froth of anxiety and then releases, changing the tonal landscape almost instantly into something that can be at times disquieting and at other times quite peaceful.

Musically speaking, much of the drama in Muhly operas comes from the orchestra, while the vocal lines deliver the story in a way that’s more often plainspoken than tuneful. “He always says, ‘Don’t count, just say the words on those notes,'” recalls Jennifer Zetlan, who sings Rebecca in the Met’s Two Boys, and who created both the role of the Mormon girl Zina in Dark Sisters and Muhly’s Far Away Songs at Alice Tully Hall last year. “When it all comes together, orchestra or piano and voice, it’s like there are no bar lines. If I heard it without ever seeing the music, I definitely wouldn’t know what the page looked like. I love that — it sounds like speech to music rather than syllables. I think it’s the best way to tell a compelling story or recite a poem with music.”

Iestyn Davies has a similar level of expertise on Muhly vocal writing. The countertenor has performed Muhly’s Brittenesque folk-song arrangements in 2011 and “Old Bones,” written for Davies and lutenist Thomas Dunford, which had its premiere this past June. “It was a fascinating project to work through with Nico,” says Davies. “We chose the texts together, and at no point did I have to keep quiet — Nico was open to suggestions on awkward bits of vocal writing. There was only really one moment when I asked if he could change something, and it was purely a personal thing to do with how I sing, and I explained I thought it would be a shame if he left it like that, because I know that nine times out of ten I would have made a hash of it. So for me that showed that Nico isn’t necessarily evangelical about the composer-as-the-center-of-the-musical-universe, but rather that he envisages the performance and the sound of the performance almost before he puts pen to paper — or mouse to screen?”

Muhly seems to be hardwired with a willingness to collaborate. One can’t see more than a few Muhly concerts in a row without witnessing violist Nadia Sirota, his friend and muse, onstage. Also integral is Muhly’s friendship with Valgeir Sigurðsson, the Icelandic musician with whom Muhly and guitarist Ben Frost founded the record label Bedroom Community (on which most of Muhly’s recordings are released). Davies has been friends with Muhly since 2009 (at his apartment, Muhly shows a picture of his dog, Oskar, bonding with Davies). “What strikes me most about Nico,” says Davies, “is that he has friends and familiar faces every corner he turns. Standing outside English National Opera chatting to Nico one day a couple of years back, I swear about four different people either cycled or drove past in the course of our brief conversation, and he had some greeting or gesture to offer them. It’s a sign of his generosity with people that he has accrued such a healthy circle of friends, not just where he lives, but across the world.”

Collaboration on a large scale also shows up in Muhly’s work. At the core of Dark Sisters, which tells the story of a small Mormon community implicated in a widespread polygamy scandal, is the concept of The Nation. “I use that with scare quotes,” says Muhly. “The way in which those women are known to us is through TV. The intimacy of that story in the first act is shattered by the fact that it’s being observed in a really public way on literal Good Morning America.” In Two Boys, we see it again: what in some other time would have been an intimate story between Brian and Jake is, in our time, a story that includes a chorus representing all internet users.

In a way, it might be easy to dub Muhly “postmodernist,” at least in the sense that this global entity, the internet, has both granted Muhly access to 400 years’ worth of music and become a topic of his work. But even that feels reductive, ignoring the point that Muhly seems to be making — which is not to distill the world around us into something smaller but to look closely and see that it’s much bigger than we realize. spacer

Oh well. There was always the revival the following June at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, where the smallish, congenial Perelman Theater has come to be seen as one of the ideal chamber opera venues in the Northeast. Even then, Muhly, librettist Stephen Karam and director Rebecca Taischman declined to have another workshop. They were all busy and sensed that changes could be made in the few weeks of rehearsal prior to the Opera Company of Philadelphia opening.

And yet … Dark Sisters wasn’t just a hit with critics who were lukewarm first time around. The opera was a considerable popular success with audiences. Word of mouth was uniformly positive. Here was something fresh, challenging and new that wasn’t beyond the grasp of an average operagoer hearing it for the first time. And in Philadelphia – a place known to fear the cutting edge.

What changed? The Perelman Theater was acoustically better than the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at New York’s John Jay College where the piece was premiered. The direction better defined the power dynamics. The mostly-female cast more specifically articulated their roles as bereft “sister- wives” (as they refer to themselves in this LDS sect) whose children have been taken away during a state raid. In the second act, where they plead for the return of their children on a Larry King-style talk show, the theatricality and use of video was less satirical and more direct. The silliness of American pop culture took a back seat to the seriousness of the issues at hand and the sincerity of the sister/wives who had lived such retrogressive, circumscribed lives, hadn’t ever hurt a soul, and simply wanted their children returned.

But can you understand why – after Muhly gave a brilliant, breezy, “What, me worry?” interview (edited transcript below) in his Manhattan apartment prior Philadelphia rehearsals – one might have been skeptical?

Q: Given the freedom you enjoy in the ordering of musical events in concert works, do you ever feel tied down to a plot when composing an opera?

A: No. I feel enormously liberated. It means all my pre-compositional nonsense about making the structure doesn’t have to happen. With opera, it’s done already. The plot is the plot. You’ve solved the problem already and you know what’s going to happen in what order. Right now I’m writing a 20-minute-long piece for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and it’s very stressful. It’s hard to know what to do with 20 minutes. That feels like being tied down.

Q: But opera comes with an added challenge: Even the smartest composer and librettist don’t know it’s going to work until they get it in front of an audience. And then there’s the give-and-take of the collaborative process.

A: Stephen Karam and I had some pretty good luck. I asked for a very, very fast draft, a quick
sketch of the whole thing. What’s the one-paragraph version? Then we chose 4 or 5 scenes to flesh out. Once I get a paragraph or a stanza, I can figure out how long it’s going to be … Sometimes with operatic pacing, by the time you hear the end of a line, your brain can forget what the characters were talking about.

Q: How often did you hit a line where it just didn’t speak in music to you?

A: I’ve been lucky. Some 90 percent of the libretto jumped off the page and I knew exactly what to do. I’m a little obsessed, I wouldn’t say with realism in opera but I want the plot to make sense. I went to the Telemann opera version of Orpheus, and as I was listening to it, I thought, this doesn’t make one goddamn bit of sense at all … though it works as a piece of music. In this opera, we’re dealing with real people. There’s less poetic license. You can’t get away with that kind of Italian parlando. There’s a middle ground. And it’s trickier than you think.

Q: Pacing may be the central problem of English-language opera.

A: You have to find that line between poetic writing and informational writing. When you watch Baroque opera, you can smell an aria coming. We know we’re in ”recit” land. We’ve learned one more piece of plot information. And now we’re going to think about it. We wanted to get away from that. We wanted the aria structurally to arise naturally as if you found it. And I’m much happier setting prose, just personally.

Q: Theatrically, Dark Sisters is fairly traditional, with its linear plot, representational settings and characters …

A: As an audience member there’s a lot of free form opera that I love, love, love. I love Satyagraha and Einstein on the Beach. That’s heaven! There are environments where I crave an evening of non-narrative art. I want to go see Laurie Anderson talking about the moon and Meredith Monk talking about Inuits. And it will be a beautiful poetic thing. There’s a generation of people who did that extremely well.

In terms of something I can make, I don’t think I’d be very good at that. I can’t do an abstract form about polygamy. I have so many opportunities this year to make abstract music. I just finished a ballet that goes backward and forward and all over the place and it’s great to to do that. But for me, as a personal philosophy it’s more interesting to write something where the singers feel like they can really own the character.

Q: How do you fathom the inner lives of characters so different from your own life?

A: Members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, both mainstream and not, are obsessive diarists.
The relationship with God is deepened through diarizing. It’s a pioneer mentality. Q: But how frank are they?

A: You can’t really tell. It doesn’t matter in a lot of cases. Sometimes these diaries are just lists of children who died. Is that frank or not?

The most famous escapee is Carolyn Jessop, who has written two books. They seem true. But there’s also a really strange divide between her ability to narrate calmly through accounts of abuse at the hands of sister-wives, But in her second book, there’s a streak of vindictiveness. She’s still talking how one of her sister-wives, who is now dead, might’ve stolen a hotel shampoo bottle in the late ’80s. From you can extrapolate that holding on to their own stuff is important. The frankness needs to be teased out in a slightly more critical read.

Q: The power dynamics must be clear, if peculiar.

A: Even when they’re explicitly saying the father/husband has all of the power, you realize that the first wife has power and acts as a surrogate for her husband. There’s a secondary matrix of power. Besides this physical and sexual power, there’s also money. You have a father with 26 kids that need to be fed on $300 a week. Both Stephen and I want to Colorado City (AZ). I’ve been there four times. It’s a fascinating time right now because so many of the men are in jail. You go there and you don’t see men at all. It’s a very specific-looking place. It’s dusty, nothing is paved, and prairie dresses …

Q: But how do you put yourself in their shoes?

A: I wouldn’t say I imagine myself in their shoes. I just tried to tell their stories from a position that’s close to them. To write the music for the prophet [the husband] was difficult. It’s easy to go into villain caricature. That’s not fair for us on the east coast to be saying, “Oh, you wacky polygamists!”

When I was reading some of these diaries, I saw that the husbands are stressed out by dealing with these fighting wives. They’re like harried businessmen. One of the complicated things in this sect … is that if a mother acts out, it can put in peril the salvation of her children. In many cases, the women bond so heavily with all the children that they autocorrect the sister wives who misbehave because they don’t want any of the family being compromised in heaven.

Q: So they tell each other, “Keep sweet.”

A: And it doesn’t actually translate as shut up. It’s this weird self-preservation thing. It’s
simultaneously a chastisement and “Please stay with me.”

One thing I didn’t want to do from day one: Have this turn into a bunch of gay people from New York playing with Barbie dolls and prairie dresses. It could easily turn into this mockery.

Q: Why this subject?

A: The topic arose out of the commission. Neal Goren, who runs Gotham Chamber Opera [one of the co-commissioners, along with Music-Theater Group and Opera Company of Philadelphia], says the best chamber operas have under 10 people onstage. Please, no children. We can’t afford it. Neal believes that it’s easier to find young women singers at this point in their careers than men. So what’s a place where you have one man and seven women? A polygamist home! I’ve been obsessed with this sect … it’s American and crazy. It runs parallel to the Lewis and Clark story and is more complicated with theology and personalities. I find it innately fascinating.

Q: How much did the piece evolve?

A: About 80 percent of the [libretto’s] first draft is almost exactly as we received it. Of that 80
percent, it’s musically unchanged since I first wrote it.

In Act II, we start in on the TV show, it’s a total change. The scary thing is that you have to have finished the expository material to deliver that scene. What that means is that Act I, by necessity, is front-loaded. And I have a neurosis that a first act has to be under an hour.

The other thing that changed between the workshop and the production is the arrangement of scenes in the first act. And that had to do with making sure that we didn’t have three ensemble pieces next to each other. After New York, there were things we could do to make Act I tighter. We took out two-and-a-half minutes and switched two scenes back to their original positions.

Q: Did you write any new music?

A: There’s one piece about 12 seconds long in the first act. It was a bridging moment.

Q: To many people, cutting two-and-a-half minutes and adding 12 seconds doesn’t sound like much.

A: Actually, two-and-a-half minutes is a huge piece of real estate. It was one of those things like looking at a bookshelf where you need to scooch things over and tighten them up. Stage time is longer and weirder. I don’t know of anyone who can judge that from a score. There’s just no way to do it. It’s even hard to judge from a recording.

Q: How did you feel about the New York reviews for Dark Sisters?

A: I didn’t read them. I stopped reading reviews a couple of years ago. The review of a piece is not for me. It’s not addressed to me. If somebody wants to say something at me, just call me. I take criticism really well. I never take it personally.
I used to be obsessed. Most reviews, good and bad, have factual inaccuracies that belie [sic] the fundamental idiocy of the critic. One referred to a violin when, in fact, it was a viola. They’re different.

Q: Couldn’t it have been a simple mistake?

A: No! No! No! It’s idiocy.
I gave up reading the arts section for Lent. I’ve lived through a couple cycles where the press
loves and hates you. In England it’s all codified. It’s like a switch.
Q: What sort of inner life are we not hearing in your music? I read that New Yorker profile. It didn’t tell me much about your personal life.

A: I work all the time. That’s what I do. There’s this weird misconception that the composer is going to be in some hut in a crazy hat, naked and with a pet bear, weeping all day with a candle.

Q: You compose much too much to keep track of so many accessories. Do you compose out of inner need?

This opera raises that possibility, then drops the subject. It is a missed opportunity.

Dark Sisters is a co-commission (and co-production) from the Opera Company of Philadelphia, Gotham Chamber Opera and Music Theatre Group. It’s based on the 1953 raid on polygamous compounds of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Arizona. When defending their definition of marriage, one of the wives of the cult’s prophet/father says that some states allow marriages of gay couples. If same-sex marriages are legal, she implies, shouldn’t polygamous or underage marriages be similarly protected? Gay marriages, of course, were unheard of in the 1950s. Nevertheless, that subject could be examined, and it would add contemporary relevance to the opera.

That’s one of several avenues upon which this opera embarks, then fails to adequately explore. At the start we learn that the government raided the camp and removed all the children. Any parent would think about nothing else but the fate of his or her children. Yet for the next hour we hear the women discuss sewing and cooking, their jealousies and rivalries, and who will their husband sleep with next.

Despite this cognitive dissonance, the first act gave us some empathy with these women. Then act 2 shows us a telecast where the host describes their “big hair” and grills them about their underage marriages. The women’s robotic responses confirms the host’s worst accusations. Now they talk about their children, but their talk was obviously pre-coached propaganda to win the support of TV viewers. Whatever sympathy we had for the wives dissipated here.

At the end, we were told that a court ordered the children to be returned, but we didn’t see that emotional reunion. The opera’s conclusion was perfunctory.

Dark Sisters raised a curtain partially and briefly on a community, and when that curtain has dropped we don’t know much more about the people than we did going in.

Musically, Muhly knows how to write effectively for women’s voices. He has composed upward phrases that allow sopranos to bloom gratefully on the top notes. He is skillful in his instrumental writing for a chamber orchestra that has only two violins and one each of viola, cello, bass, flute, clarinet, oboe, French horn, harp, keyboard and percussion. Sometimes he produces a full rich sound that you would not expect from such a small group. Elsewhere, the instruments support and embellish the vocal lines with some nice shimmering effects.

The sound is astringent and there are not enough developed melodies that build to emotional climaxes. Like the story, the music is tantalizing but not quite fulfilling.

The women’s singing is spectacular. Strongest is Jennifer Check as Almera. She has a big voice with beautiful high notes. All of the others were accomplished too: Caitlin Lynch, Eve Giglotti, Margaret Lattimore, Kristina Bachrach and Jennifer Zetlan. The one man in the cast was the rather stolid (intentionally so, I assume) bass Kevin Burdette as the prophet/father/ husband and also as the TV host.

Neal Goren conducted with authority. Rebecca Taichman’s direction included evocations of the American Southwest but could also have used some symbolic reminder of the women’s psychological and physical confinement.

The New York based composer, who is no slouch in the style department, is also a prolific opera composer. Last year he received much attention for his opera “Two Boys,” which dealt with a detective investigating a murder of a teenager that leads her to a trail of clues on the Internet. The opera premiered at the English National Opera last summer and will next be seen at the Metropolitan Opera.
Nico Muhly

He is currently in Philly for the second run of “Dark Sisters,” a chamber opera he composed with librettist Stephen Karam (short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize this past year for his play “Sons of the Prophet”), about six women trapped in a renegade Mormon church commune called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Lean, taut direction

According to a story in the Huffington Post at the time of the opera’s New York premiere last year, “FLDS, one of the Mormon Church’s largest fundamentalist splinter groups — still holds plural marriage up as a main tenet of devotion. ’Dark Sisters,’ with libretto by playwright Stephen Karam, depicts not only the religious tumult these five FLDS women face, but also the hysteria of the national media in reaction to the raids.”

The work, a co-commission with the Opera Company of Philadelphia with Gotham Chamber Opera and Music-Theatre Group, premiered last winter in New York to wonderful reviews.

“Gotham Chamber Opera and the Music-Theatre Group give this work as superb a production as any new opera might hope for, with lean, taut direction from Rebecca Taichman and the sturdy guidance of conductor Neal Goren. Among a uniformly excellent cast, Caitlyn Lynch unfurled a shimmering soprano as rebellious wife Eliza, while soprano Jennifer Check and mezzo Margaret Lattimore lent firm dignity to supporting roles,” wrote critic James Jorden in the New York Post.
Where religion and politics meet Muhly was in a frenetic mood when EDGE caught up with him at the first orchestra dress rehearsal this week at the Perelman Theater in the Kimmel Center. “When I’m in the middle of one thing, I’m desperately craving something else,” he explained.

Writing an opera about the place where religion and politics meet is something that Muhly relates to. In fact, he thinks all operas are political in one way or another. “I can’t think of one opera that isn’t political in some way. When you look at Rameau, Handel, Mozart, they were all looking at the world around them socially and politically. ’Cosi Fan Tutti’ is an incredibly political opera. Right now there is a flare up of interest about Mormonism, but the politics and discussions around it aren’t new,” he reminded.

The opera deals with issues of suppressed individuality and subservient women’s roles in the a Fundamentalist Church sect that split from mainstream Mormonism in the early 20th century largely because of the LDS Church’s renunciation of polygamy. Some of the source material for the opera is culled the two most famous raids on FLDS compounds, in 1953 and in 2004, follows the story of one of the women who tries to leave.

Unison speech patterns

Mulhy has been researching the history of the church for many years. “I read the diaries of some of the wives of Brigham Young; you think you could be reading something from the Old Testament or from today. Similarly, once you get in the world of what constitutes marriage it was always political, and about property, land. Marriage for love was a Victorian construct.”

Moral arguments aside, Mulhy had musical challenges writing six lead women’s roles “There was the acoustic challenge to keep them distinct, which we achieved partially through casting and by now putting them in each other’s way vocally,” he explained.

“One of the things that allowed me to unlock it was watching an interview that some of (fundamentalist) wives did on Larry King Live. They had unison speech patterns, which is musically interesting to me.

“There’s one man and women’s voices are echoing through these halls.

No boy sopranos

“Stephen wrote the libretto, before I did the music, so we had the foresight to tailor the parts for this cast, which is amazing, with six very different voice types.

“Caitlin Lynch plays Eliza, the woman who tries to leave. She has a different approach to how she deploys the beauty of her sound. Jennifer Check, who plays Almera, has this ethereal upper register and she’s a wonderful, comic actor in her middle range. The singer who plays Ruth, Eve Gigliotti, has this creamy and husky mezzo voice and there is this mad scene aria, which is the first thing I wrote for the opera.”

The orchestral template is “site specific… jagged and arid at points, there is some pioneer folk music floating around.”

He noted there have only been a few changes since the New York premiere. “When you are running opera there’s so much you can learn when it’s in front of an audience and you figure certain things out. The little things are unavailable to know until you are there in real time. No one turned into a boy soprano,” he joked.

Mulhy said that he tweaks things based on decisions the singer makes in performance as well. “You can see how adrenalin of a performance changes delivery, so you’re making subtle changes.

“That’s one of the things that makes opera so interesting… a singer reacting to a real moment onstage. It’s such a rush,” he said.

Rebecca Taichman is the stage director and Neal Goren, Artistic Director of Gotham Chamber Opera, conducts. Opera Company of Philadelphia premiere of “Dark Sisters” at the Perelman Theater in the Kimmel Center, Philadelphia.

“Dark Sisters” runs June 8 – 27, 2012 at the Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts at Broad and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA. For more information, visit the Opera Company of Philadelphia website.

Culturally significant with a socio-political timeliness, Dark Sisters is the best single show I’ve seen from OCP and one of the finest operas I’ve seen in two seasons anywhere on the East Coast. It is everything art should be: beautiful, thought-provoking, engrossing, chilling, disturbing, breathtaking.
The storyline of Dark Sisters could have been ripped from the headlines of a modern American newspaper or a TV news show reporting on the polygamist compounds on society’s fringes and under siege from the United States government.

The opera opens just after federal agents have removed all the children from the cult’s ranch, having learned that the Prophet—the cult’s leader—forces young teenage girls into marriage. Without their children to care for, the Prophet’s five wives are bereft and filled with emptiness. No strangers to suffering, the Prophet’s wives share strained sisterly relationships. They have learned to steel themselves against their suffering by “Keeping Sweet,” a kind of self talk, an indoctrination of sorts to keep their minds from filling with negative, destructive and independent thoughts.

The wives, the Dark Sisters, are well differentiated. There’s the dutiful ones, the favored one, the full-on crazy wife, and one who discovers she cannot be content preparing for the joy and fulfillment promised in the next life by suffering in this one. Eliza realizes she wants some measure of happiness during her earthly life. When she learns from another of the Prophet’s wives that he has pledged her 15-year-old daughter to wed a near 60-year-old man, she knows she must get herself and her daughter out.

You won’t leave the Perelman Theater humming the score, but you may be moved to complete silence and hours of contemplation, as I was upon realizing that some women are treated like goods and chattel in 21st-century America.

Everything and everyone bears mention for the success of this show. The set by Leo Warner, the spectacular video design by Warner and Mark Grimmer, and the lighting by Donald Holder combined for the ideal vehicle showcasing director Rebecca Taichman’s vision for the show as a symbolic and surreal statement about the oppression of women in modern-day religious sects. Together they make a powerful statement revealing a male-dominated microcosm who claim moral superiority, all the while grinding their filthy work boots into the necks of cowed, indoctrinated women.

No lumbering, creaking set pieces in this production, no sir. The special effects seamlessly supported the storytelling and included a sophisticated simulation of an on-air cable TV interview with big screens flying on and offstage and a cliff rising out of the forbidding landscape for a treacherous purpose. The second-act scene with the mad Ruth having a psychotic break while teetering at the cliff’s edge was one of the most heart-pounding scenes I’ve ever witnessed on an opera stage.

Nico Muhly’s score is many things you might expect to hear in a new American opera. It’s discordant, at times, but also palatable and powerful. When strains of Sunday School hymns intermingle with contemporary notes and rhythms, the sacred tunes become haunting rather than consoling. The libretto by Stephen Karam riveted the audience to the supertitle screen. I was torn between watching the stage and not wanting to miss a word because the dialogue is so exquisitely crafted.

Dark Sisters is an ensemble show and every cast member deserves mention for their stellar contribution to its artistic success: Caitlyn Lynch, Eve Gigliotti, Jennifer Check, Margaret Lattimore, Jennifer Zetlan, Kristina Bachrach, and Kevin Burdette, who was so effective playing the loathsome, libidinous Prophet and all the other male roles that he was booed at curtain call. Bravo to all the players for their bravery, talent, and willingness to take risks.

Conductor Neal Goren managed the talented musicians of the Opera Company of Philadelphia Orchestra with aplomb, supporting the singers through interwoven vocal lines as the wives alternately sang over one another or chanted their self-talk, almost arhythmically. The score became chaotic-sounding as the action lurched, sputtered, and soared. It must be a tremendous challenge for Goren, leading musicians to succeed in a work such as this. But succeed he did.

Dark Sisters runs for three more performances. It is an important work in the landscape of modern chamber opera and deserves to be seen and experienced. If such a show can result from collaborative opera, let’s have more of it in spades.

In their long white cotton nighties, their resemblance to crying babies collected in a nursery ward perfectly describes the confound of their looping existence, in which women who are still children exist only to bear more children. The unsatisfied yearnings of their under-developed psyches call out and intermingle in a kind of Renaissance polyphony, and we feel how they are, both in their prescribed roles and their suffering, reduced to their animal natures: coyotes yowling in the desert.

Without overstating this or becoming tiresome, Muhly was able throughout the opera to express, musically, the closed-off and repetitive nature of the wives’ existence. Vocal lines often circled around a central pitch, bits of text that served as instructive mantras to the women (“Keep sweet, keep sweet . . .”) would be passed around and intoned over and over. Though never literally “minimalist”, one did detect hints of the possible influence of Steve Reich, as well as Bjo?rk and Arvo Pa?rt, in Muhly’s structuring and tonality. One longed on occasion for more variety of tempo from either Mr. Muhly or Mr. Goren (who otherwise offered deft and secure leadership in the pit), although the steadiness had its own kind of propulsion to it, the momentum of breathing.

Obviously this opera has many parallels with that other set of dark sisters in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, and as that is one of the operatic masterpieces of all time, too close a comparison would be unfair (and beside the point). That opera is also repetitive and occasionally plodding in its evocation of a community bound by ritual in perpetua. However, it did strike me that one way in which Poulenc succeeds where Dark Sisters disappointed was in revealing the richness of the inner lives of the women. Are the sister-wives’ struggles really no greater than trying to remain obedient, “sweet”, and in competing for their husband’s attention? Maybe not.

Although that aspect of the libretto felt predictable and less interesting to me, perhaps there is an essential difference between Carmelite nuns and the women of the FLDS sect: whereas the Old Prioress says “the convent cannot be a refuge”, the FLDS members, like many doomed utopian sects before them, hope to create their own sheltered Paradise on Earth, and in doing so have tried to expunge violence, passion, and questioning from the sacred, in favor of bland, candy-colored visions of the Next Life. Perhaps Muhly’s generally soft-edged music was consciously expressive of this specifically Mormon aesthetic.
A more three-dimensional persona was granted to one wife, the protagonist Eliza (sung with intelligent nuance and feeling by Caitlin Lynch), and while her touching aria under the stars and her straining to hear the voice of God was effectively communicated, I did long for the challenge of the theological debate that Blanche’s similar (if reverse) journey in Carmelites offers us. In other words, the libretto on occasion felt a little dumbed-down.

I appreciated that the piece (unlike many new operas) was not over-orchestrated, and allowed the singers to always remain front and center. (Brava to diction coach Kathryn LaBouff for the beautifully lucid American diction displayed throughout). Mr. Muhly found economical means of highlighting character and drama in the colors of the orchestra: the rasp and rattle of Ruth’s grating mental illness; the childlike purity of the hymns, accompanied by the harp and woodwinds; the sparkling grandeur of the starry desert sky. He also knew to save the extremes of the voice for the moments of highest drama, and with many fine sopranos in the cast, every high note was one to relish.

Jennifer Zetlan was a stand-out among the sister wives, finding the odd sweet spot of dazed placidity meeting jealous judgment that one perceives in the indoctrinated; her singing was precise, facile and energized, and she had the best diction of the cast.
Kevin Burdette, always a fine actor, focused his energy into a powerfully restrained performance as the Prophet-Husband. His simple slow grin at Lucinda’s berating the heretic Eliza at the end of the opera spoke volumes.

Eve Gigliotti (like all the performers, well-directed by Rebecca Taichman) had the difficult task of embodying the mentally ill Ruth, and this she accomplished without caricature or cliche?. Although her suicide aria never quite delivered musically as effectively as the set did (with gorgeous rain showers falling over the desert), she held our attention with her edgy intensity.

The set design, by Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer (of 59 Productions/ “War Horse” fame), managed to be both ascetically stark as well as deeply sensual. The red earth, the stormy sky, the hand-hewn bench: we did not require anything more to inhabit and breathe the air of this world. Especially chilling was the bed that rose like an altar in the center of the stage at the end of the first act, reminding us of what all of this is ultimately about: the sexual subjugation of women. The row of portraits of elders seemed to leer at the bed from the back wall, and Eliza’s wedding-night trauma was staged in a way that involved just enough sexual violation, making it effective without being tasteless.

I recall watching Oprah’s interview with some of the women of the FLDS Mt. Zion Ranch (“Okay, explain to us what we’re all wondering about: the hair!”) and while I had expected to condemn or pity the women, I found myself surprised by their wisdom and genuine spirituality. I came away wondering if maybe they had a point, that perhaps they did at least have a belonging, a community, and a surety about life that our modern age has lost in blind pursuit of individual freedom at all costs. And I guess this is what was missing from the otherwise excellent Dark Sisters for me: our allegiance with the heroine who escapes is assumed, and we feel little sympathy or understanding for the smiling sisters who remain at the end, holding hands, singing a Copland-esque hymn. We know they love their children and are committed to keeping sweet; but might they also have some higher truths hidden beneath their swelling hair?

A co-production with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Two Boys has been years in the planning. Hype has been intelligently fostered not only by the articulate figurehead of 29-year-old Muhly himself, but also in a multimedia assault of website and viral YouTube video. At last, a contemporary opera not only talking the digital talk, but tweeting it too.

Developing his interest in narrative opera, Muhly has taken the legacy of Britten and Berg and created a police procedural. Shocking crime, love interest, alcoholic loner detective, are all in the places allotted by countless episodes of Prime Suspect; even the dialogue of Craig Lucas’ libretto is the lumpen vernacular of text-speak and casual profanity of daily life, never allowing itself to get seduced into prose let alone poetry.

Yet somewhere in the background of this familiar drama – and always the background – is a new element: music. All the action must travel at operatic pace, must contend with the conventions of aria, duet, ensemble that make up the genre. Muhly’s answer too often is to attempt to wriggle around these, to transform a love duet into a “private chat”, musically fragmented and insubstantial, to deny closure in his Act I and II finales until even a passacaglia feels unfinished, inconclusive.

Muhly’s brand of muscular minimalism owes much to Philip Glass and more to John Adams, whose textures as well as whose techniques animate the writing. Yet while Adams will occasionally surrender to the lyric impulse, will use his musical processes to shape as well as reflect the drama, here music seems oddly incidental, a sort of over-promoted soundtrack to Bartlett Sher’s efficient production that coaxes where it should commandAt its best in the yearning strings of Brian’s (Nicky Spence) ode to the internet and in the poignant Britten-inspired writing for treble voice (precociously delivered by the captivating Joseph Beesley), it exposes itself at the moment of impact, the stabbing itself. Here surely is the drama to compel a composer, to force descriptive music into action; but just as John Adams’ Dr Atomic surrendered to sound-effect at the moment of nuclear explosion (a collapse earned, and sustained by the opera as a whole), so here Muhly refuses the challenge in orchestral writing that barely acknowledges the event.

Like the sinister, faceless cousins of Peter Grimes’ Borough, the chorus are central to Muhly’s drama – a multiplicity of voices, a web of aleatory polyphony that seethes and pulses with the life of the internet. Framed in the aura of glowing laptop screens it is their music that cocoons the drama, embracing and dissolving it into their digital Babel. Their music is staged by the exquisite animations and projections of 59 Productions, which fill the extremes of the Coliseum stage space with fluid worlds of codeless patterns.

If challenged by the music’s refusal to acknowledge character, ENO’s magnificent cast of singers didn’t show it. Nicky Spence outdid all expectation in the vocal authority and shading of teenager assailant Brian, matched for quality of tone by Mary Bevan’s pouting schoolgirl Rebecca. After an unusually uncertain start Susan Bickley stepped up to the crucial role of Anne Strawson, her dramatic experience serving her well through the rather thankless task she is set.

There is a contradiction at the core of all minimalist opera. Its anti-dramatic drama chafes against the memory of Wagner’s Gesamkunstwerk, and one must surrender to this tension if any understanding or enjoyment is to be had. In pitting narrative at its most urgent – the detective drama – against determinedly non-narrative music Muhly achieves an extraordinary feat, fostering genuine tension in his listener, calibrating his climax with mastery. Yet all goes for naught if he cannot, or will not, force the moment to its musical crisis.

The opera tackles the great themes of our age: the internet, youth corruptibility, sexual coming of age. And while Muhly’s music deals with these with a humanity and wisdom that opens many more emotional and intellectual doors than Prime Suspect could, its most basic building blocks are those of a well-structured ITV crime drama. The plot centres on a real-life attempted murder case. One suicidal teenage internet-obsessive conjures up a fantasy world and persuades another to meet him and to kill him. The opera follows detective Anne (Susan Bickley) as she tries to figure out who did what to whom.

That many of us knew most of the ins and outs of this bizarre story and yet still were hooked to every twist and turn shows the quality of much of screenwriter Craig Lucas’s plotting and Muhly’s musical setting. For make no mistake, Muhly’s score absolutely lives up to the media hype. Neither evading nor aping its Minimalist roots (there are carefully chosen quotes from teacher Philip Glass rather than heavy fingerprints), the score sets out on its own distinct, economical but powerful path.

Forbidding dark oceans of sound (punctuated by great booming eruptions from timpani or tuba) orbit the story like journeying whales, conjuring up the bottomless vastness of the internet, and echoing the sounds of the sea in Grimes. These give way to shallower pools of sound that allow for the music to move at a faster pace and engage in the more frenetic online activity, not least a bit of masturbation. This dramatic shape-shifting, mirrored by Lucas’s energetic plotting which ping-pongs back and forth in time, is aided by a remarkably fluid (if a little drab and bitty) set from Michael Yeargan.

It’s remarkable how the production and story conjure up this feeling of discombobulation without leaving you completely adrift. The glue is no doubt in the music: both in its recurring patterns and forms and its melody. Muhly writes quite beautifully for the voice. And every singer repays him handsomely. Heather Shipp and her glassy tones were mesmerising in the service of the mysterious internet intercessor Fiona. Mary Bevan was strong as the horny schoolgirl Rebecca. Jonathan McGovern delivered some exceptional singing as Jake.

What was especially fine about the central triumvirate, however, was the acting. Susan Bickley’s Detective, Anne, was like watching vintage Helen Mirren. Nicky Spence (Brian) may not have been a believable teenager to look at but more than made up for that in his irascible delivery. And then there was sweet little Joseph Beesley, the heartbreakingly damaged schoolboy mastermind of all this madness. His negotiation of the vocal and emotional terrain was simply incredible.

Stealing the show, however, and somewhat overshadowing the prosaics of Bartlett Sher’s production and direction (a good effort but uninspirational) were the graphics from Fifty Nine Productions and the way they worked their projections out over the choral writing. One breathtaking scene saw screen-saver geometry explode like fireworks over a veiled chorus of online chatterers, intermittently illuminating them and their computers. Their unsynchronised psalmody (in chatroom speak) resembled the ravishingly ragged feel of a Russian Orthodox congregation.

Muhly’s writing was full of powerfully resonant moments like these, which seemed to bore straight to an emotional core. I loved all the writing for massed voices. I loved the way he refused to end each part on a full stop. I loved the tuba-menaced quintet of the end of the first act. The heart stopped in the final passacaglia. Was there too much explanation of what the opera was about? No doubt. There were problems with the libretto (a number of weak lines here and there). But overall this was a terrific evening of opera. Muhly’s first entry to this genre – a long overdue operatic assessment of one of the great game-changers of our times: the Manichaean reality that is the internet – proves beyond doubt that he is a composer to be reckoned with. Do we have an heir to John Adams? Very possibly.

Now it’s the English National Opera’s turn, with a dark and undoubtedly controversial probe into the cyberworld and the murkier depths of the internet.
And, after the recent much-publicised arrest of a reclusive Essex teenager accused of hacking into Government websites, there is an eerie prescience about this extraordinary world premiere.

The young American composer Nico Muhly’s complex and often compelling new opera was inspired by a real-life internet crime in Manchester, where two boys were convicted of attempted murder and incitement to murder after the discovery of an elaborate series of chatroom dialogues.
Muhly’s opera – with a subtly idiomatic libretto by playwright and screenwriter Craig Lucas – chillingly follows a woman detective’s investigation after a teenage boy is stabbed.
Is it attempted murder – or a weird internet pact? Agatha Christie it ain’t. ENO had warned that the work was unsuitable for under-16s, containing scenes of graphic sex and language that might offend.

Well, yes, there’s a fair amount of sexual content, including scenes of masturbation. But it’s never gratuitous and always dramatically credible.
Perhaps the real shock (for this internet-innocent, at least) is the insidious lure of the virtual world — a realm of fantasy, duplicity and obsession.
Director Bartlett Sher’s assured staging — a co-production with New York’s Met — claustrophobically captures this geeky, multi-faceted cyberworld with minimalist sets and brilliant video projections.

But the real revelation of the evening is Muhly’s score. It’s his first opera, and the vocal and orchestral writing is rich and accessible.
There are certainly hints of his mentor, Philip Glass, but the choral interludes are strangely reminiscent of Benjamin Britten.

It’s persuasively played under conductor Rumon Gamba, and a fine cast is led convincingly by Susan Bickley’s bemused detective and Nicky Spence as the teenage suspect, Brian.
The evening sometimes — perhaps inevitably — seems a little static. But it’s undoubtedly an opera for our time. I shall be reading my e-mails rather more closely in future.

Enter the young composer Nico Muhly’s opera “Two Boys,” which had its world premiere at the English National Opera here last week in advance of its arrival at the Metropolitan Opera, which commissioned it, during the 2013-14 season.

Here, finally, is not merely the music on the Internet, but the music of the Internet: a babble of overlapping fragments, texting as supertitles — “hey,” “i thought i lost u,” “r u there?”— that’s gorgeous and frustrating, transparent and impenetrable. It may just be a chorus singing it on a stage, each member’s face illuminated by his or her own laptop. But it’s also a vision of what our immense social networks might sound like if we could get outside of them and listen.

On Wednesday, at the third performance of the production, directed by Bartlett Sher, it was clear that Mr. Muhly, at 29, writing his first full-length opera, has done just that: been inside and outside, both an active participant in our culture and a detached observer of it. It is the delicate balance of every great piece of art, and “Two Boys” is Mr. Muhly’s best work yet.

Based on events that occurred in Manchester, England, in 2003, the opera’s libretto, by the playwright Craig Lucas, has the propulsion of a police procedural. The obligatory seen-it-all officer is Detective Inspector Anne Strawson, who is investigating an attempted murder: a teenager has stabbed a slightly younger boy.

In the course of her investigation, it becomes clear that things are — cue the “Law & Order” deadbolt clang — more complicated than they seemed. The credulous, well-meaning older boy, Brian, says he committed the assault under orders from shadowy figures with whom he would chat on the Internet.

Strangely enough, he is telling the truth, but it is gradually revealed that the whole thing has actually been orchestrated by the younger boy, Jake, who played the entire cast of goading characters, seducing and maddening Brian to incite his own murder. Jake wanted, it seems, the same things people have always wanted from the Internet: sexual excitement, a cure for loneliness, to experiment with different personalities. “To be loved,” the chorus adds at the end. “To be remembered.”

Without using electronic instruments, Mr. Muhly has created a world immersed in technology; his sound palette is Britten, not “Tron.” There are softly chiming gongs and ethereal winds, lyrical and sinuous strings and sympathetic, Romantic orchestral surges. The second act starts with an eerie, suspended calm punctured by string flourishes that develop into something almost folksy. There are foreboding minor-key arpeggios throughout, but Mr. Muhly ventures far beyond stock Minimalism. He even creates a new setting for part of the Anglican service; the sound of church music, dense yet floating, permeates the opera.

Indeed, the choral writing is the work’s most successful element. Touches of old-fashioned ornamentation have been added to Strawson’s straightforward lines to emphasize how technologically primitive she is. (“What’s a server?” she asks at one point.) Brian is given to excited exhortations.

But the solo lines in general blend together, highlighting the cipherish aspect of the opera’s characterizations. Strawson is stereotypically hard-bitten and secretly lonely; Brian is resolutely, utterly ordinary. The plot unfolds, but no one really learns anything or changes. Despite a committed cast (with standout performances by Susan Bickley as Strawson and Nicky Spence as Brian), it is the plot that sweeps us forward, not the characters. The opera’s resistance to neat, redemptive arcs is brave, but something is missing. We know the fact of Jake’s desperate loneliness, for instance, but we never feel its, or his, individuality.

This is partly a result of Mr. Sher’s efficient but faceless production. The scenes shift with cinematic ease: a conversation that begins in Brian’s bedroom might end seamlessly in Strawson’s office.

The projections on the looming walls, which help create spaces both real and abstract, are sometimes thrilling, with heart-pounding use of the “footage” from the crime scene. But the choral interludes are illustrated by images out of an AT&T commercial, networks of light forming and disintegrating. Giant blowups of computer printouts blur and recede risibly during Strawson’s detective work. And Mr. Sher has those stylized projections awkwardly share space with realistic furniture that actors are continually required to move.

Mr. Sher’s production is at its weakest in one of the opera’s crucial scenes, in which Jake arrives in Brian’s bedroom to proposition him. The blocking is dull and uncertain, with much of the action obscured by a desk. Since the scene’s complex mix of emotions — disgust, shame, love — motivates the climax of the opera, our lack of a clear sense of what has happened lessens the work’s eventual impact and our sense of these characters as people.

That so much emotion remains is largely because of Mr. Muhly, whose music is suffused with feeling and free of moral judgments. It is odd that the English National Opera has billed “Two Boys” as a “cautionary tale” about the Internet, when the opera represents online life more ambiguously, as a space of utter possibility, and Jake’s plot as a creative act. He plans to die, hoping that “everyone will say what a beautiful voice I had.”

That is the wish of any artist. In his program biography Mr. Muhly describes himself as “a former boy chorister”; it can’t be coincidence that Jake, too, is a choirboy and, like Mr. Muhly, a prodigy who loves to interact on his computer. Jake’s mother could be referring to Mr. Muhly when she describes her son: “He’s more grown-up than anyone I know.”

The opera derives much of its power from this intensely personal quality. “Two Boys” has much to do with being an artist — an individual — and the way society makes it possible (and impossible) to create, showing the disturbing roads creativity can travel. Its characters could perhaps be more vividly drawn, its production clearer, but it richly fulfills the promise of opera: an entertainment of ideas. For once, you leave the theater talking not about whether the soprano has hit her high notes but about a work’s themes, its relevance to our lives.

Serious and radiant, “Two Boys” is a landmark in the career of an important artist. Confidently staking his claim to the operatic tradition, Mr. Muhly has added to it a work of dark beauty.

Since late last year, it seems that the personable and obviously multi-talented Muhly has been (pardon the allusion) pushed down our throats from every media-angle, and by too many London hacks anxious to maintain their street-cred in Twitter-land. This kind of media blitz is obviously a two-edged sledgehammer: if the show bombs then everybody looks somewhat foolish, if it achieves critical and/or box-office success (I suspect the latter in this case) then we’ll probably get bombarded again all too soon with the next wonder-kid of modern music. Ah well.

Mary Bevan

At the world premiere of Two Boys last night, (cleverly being opened here and not at its co-pro alma mater of the Met) you would have been forgiven for thinking that you had missed the date and wandered into London Fashion Week. Everyone who had read all the supplements, all the tweets, all the blogs and listened to the podcasts — or even just came on spec because everyone else said they should — was there. It was achingly hip. Never mind — we all want opera extending its audience so why not? It probably swelled the coffers of the ENO champagne bar.

So how was it? Well, perhaps one should score it in TV Talent Show style and take it from there:
Story: 6/10, Music: 6/10, Production: 6/10……..you get the idea I expect. Singers? Definitely 8/10, if only for commitment to the work, vocal characterisation, and damn good acting within the limits of the production.

Craig Lucas has written a libretto that is based on a true news story of some years ago about two boys, internet chat rooms, assumed identities and attempted murder and this story — slight as it is in dramatic terms — worked to a point. What was lacking was any depth of characterisation, any motivations or emotional developments to give the piece structure. Maybe that was part of the plan: certainly the waves of music that swirled and pulsed and counterpointed the long articulated lines of speech/song didn’t suggest much in the way of dramatic development or journey. Muhly’s work is difficult to describe; his music is like high-class mood-music, or perhaps those compositions carefully constructed and “written to picture” for an expensive nature documentary. It doesn’t challenge the listener, nor does it repel — but I doubt it delighted or surprised many either.

Susan Bickley and Nicky Spence

The singers were universally good: the core of the story lies with the investigating police officer played by Susan Bickley (does she ever disappoint?) who has demons of her own to confront as a stranger in the strange land of her suspect’s virtual world of net friends. Her diction was excellent and character well-drawn. That suspect, who we know as “Brian”, is sung by young tenor Nicky Spence with a tremendous empathy for this pathetic, unintelligent, bullied young man who’s flashes of desperate anger at his uncomprehending parents just reinforce his weakness and lack of self esteem.

That excellent work was matched by the amazingly confident performance of boy treble Joseph Beesley — one just hopes that the calculated evil inherent in his character doesn’t leave too much of a shadow. The many supporting roles were equally well presented and sung without a single unhappy choice — and singers and orchestra (under Rumon Gamba) seemed well-rehearsed and remarkably slick considering this was a first night of an entirely new work.

On the production side, a few good ideas were made much of but could have been given more emphasis — the video backdrops of world-wide internet “chatting” — words repeating, and reappearing, and often mirroring the actual sung words. Some of the best dramatic moments came with the chorus spread around and above the stage suggesting the vast numbers of internet chatters communicating endlessly and pointlessly from their sad individual bedrooms. The graphic video work was good — but again could have been so much more; in fact the whole production just felt as if it were treading far too carefully, too “nicely” and was afraid of upsetting anyone. All a bit anodyne, in essence. Perhaps they will push the boat out a bit more for its New York premiere? Somehow, I doubt it.

Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but being trialled by English National Opera, the opera unfolds the whole rather pathetic tale in flashback, through the eyes and ears of Anne Strawson, the whisky-drinking detective investigating the case of Brian, aged 16, accused of stabbing Jake, aged 13. To find the causes of this seemingly inexplicable crime Strawson has to immerse herself in the world of chatrooms and internet role play, and then separate fact from fantasy in the story that Brian tells her.

If all that sounds like a plot from a run-of-the-mill British TV detective series with a female protagonist (Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect perhaps), then that is unfortunately what all too much of the opera seems to be, with the rather leaden text sung rather than spoken, and Muhly’s music provdiing the tasteful backdrop. The first of two acts unfolds as a frieze-like series of short stories, with little overall dramatic shape or focus; in the second, the pace may be a bit more urgent, but very little more convincing: always more documentary rather than drama, and a bland mid-Atlantic compromise at that.

Musically it unfolds far too sedately, with vocal declamation over smoothly contoured orchestral ostinatos, pitched somewhere between recent Philip Glass and the John Adams of The Death of Klinghoffer, as the default musical idiom. Just occasionally the music reveals what might have been – in the aleatoric choral writing depicting the cyber-babble of the chatrooms, the multi-layered chorus with which the work ends, or some of the wonderfully voiced orchestral textures, such as the poignant string lines that underpin the aria in which Brian attempts to describe the importance of the internet in his life. But balance between pit and stage is a regular problem, and too many vocal lines get swamped by the orchestral textures.

That’s when the Muhly one recognises from his previous orchestral and vocal works snaps into focus; but they are fleeting moments in what is, alas, a plodding and amorphous work. There is two hours of music, but it seems far longer, mostly because none of the characters – not Susan Bickley’s overworked Strawson, Nicky Spence’s rather two-dimensional Brian, or Jonathan McGovern’s Jake, let alone the sketched-in gallery of smaller roles – is given enough the dramatic presence to engage any sympathy.

Rumon Gamba’s conducting is as efficiently functional as Bartlett Sher’s production, in which video projections (computer graphics, cctv footage, chatroom exchanges) by 59 Productions provides most of the visual interest. There’s nothing really arresting, though, nothing to lift the general sense of disappointment that pervades the whole evening.

The story, loosely based on real events which took place in a Northern British industrial city, sees two boys become intertwined in a dark web world of chat rooms and shrouded identities. The story is presented via the investigating detective – a single, hard-edged, whisky-drinking policewoman (a stalwart character of too many crime dramas perhaps to feel entirely fresh to UK audiences), and through the online ‘conversations’ as experienced by the older of the two boys.

It’s an impressive debut in the genre from a composer, still not 30 years old, who has garnered much attention – not to mention a Decca deal – in the past few years. But what I want to reflect on here is the setting of speech, and what that means when ‘speech’ is something very different from the eloquent oration of a Mozartian hero.

For sustained sections of the opera Muhly takes the frenetic brevity of teenagers’ online exchanges, and sets them to music, and in so doing lends these truncated stabs at socialisation a humanity that only really exists in the eyes of the protagonist. But, we’re invited to consider, does it make them any less real, or meaningful, to those involved? Setting speech to music can elevate words above the the clumsy, earthy rhythms of language – it’s what makes opera such a powerful art-form.

And so in lending eloquence to these chat-room utterances, as Muhly does, he creates an almost painful parody of conversation – it hints, with pathos, at what web communication could and should be, but here isn’t. The story reveals that the exchanges of acronyms and abbreviations so often dismissed as txt spk by most of us, have a genuine importance, an almost hyper-reality, for those involved – tragically so in this case. It’s a reality given to them by Muhly’s music, and becomes one we can no longer avoid.

Muhly’s writing owes much to John Adams and Philip Glass, which is not to imply any sense of unoriginality – it’s a language that he’s absorbed as just one part of his own musical voice. Where his voice really shines however is in the epic, aleatoric choral moments, which Muhly describes as “a highly stylized, abstracted representation of chatter, a representation of the multiplicity of what’s on the internet”. Juxtaposed with the depravity and desperation of the words and images conveyed, it becomes not a shock chorus but a powerful and haunting expression of emptiness, at once sublime and desperately sad, an elegy to wasted possibilities.

These sections are enhanced by some beautiful visual imagery from 59 Productions, which captures the vastness and interconnectivity of the online world. Incidentally, the music here (not the text of course!) brought to mind some of the most inspired moments on Muhly’s disc of Anglican choral music, ‘A Good Understanding’: you can read a recent interview with Muhly (http://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/interviews/drinking- the-air-before-him-–-nico-muhly) by Gramophone’s James Jolly about this recording.

While the medium of the web may be new, human nature never is of course: both boys are ultimately victims of themselves, and history tells us that’s an old story. As the detective’s elderly mother reminds us when her daughter bemoans the youth of today, her generation was just the same. And despite the opera’s bleak analysis of the dark byways of the digital universe, Muhly, we might conclude from his blog (https://nicomuhly.com/) , sees much good in computers too. And if you’re reading this, I can assume you do as well.

We must just be grateful then that in Muhly’s youth, his computer presumably spent more time running Sibelius notation software than logged in to chat rooms.