Jennifer Higdon’s $130-million heist opera finally premieres after its Philly debut fell through. Twice.
'Woman With Eyes Closed' by Philadelphia’s best-known and most-awarded composer is playing at Pittsburgh Opera
Everything was all set. Twice. And then?
Jennifer Higdon’s second opera — Woman With Eyes Closed — was commissioned, completed ahead of deadline, cast and workshopped when the 2020 lockdown canceled Opera Philadelphia’s premiere. The highly unusual premise — about a notorious, real-life 2012 art heist in Rotterdam — was dropped again when the ailing company’s 2024 fall festival was put on hold.
“I quickly accepted that it wasn’t going up at all … but I’m a big believer that things happen the way they need to,” said Higdon, 62, who was Philadelphia’s best-known and most-awarded composer for decades before recently relocating to Chapel Hill, N.C.
The hoped-for happy ending — the world premiere, in other words — is now Pittsburgh Opera’s April 26-May 4 run at the Bitz Opera Factory, in an intimate theater housed within a former Westinghouse Air Brake factory. The venue is not inappropriate for a hardscrabble story and characters who sing in the desperate language of thieves.
Written for five principal singers and 12 instruments, the compact, intermission-less opera takes its title from an enigmatic Lucian Freud painting that was stolen along with masterpieces by Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, and Monet in a mere 90 seconds from the Kunsthal museum. Their value: $130 million.
A year later in 2013, a trio of apprehended Romanians — Radu Dogaru, Alexandru Bitu, and Eugen Darie — said the paintings were left with Dogaru’s mother (named Mona in the opera) who burned one or more believing that with no evidence, there would be no conviction.
Telltale ashes were found in her furnace though nobody agrees on how many paintings were destroyed. In one account in the mom’s ever-changing story, the paintings were taken away by a mysterious Ukrainian man in a big black car. The fact that Higdon and librettist Jerre Dye settled on three different endings — to be presented in successive performances — is “actually a sign of restraint,” said the composer. “As many as 12 endings have been possible.”
In what now sounds like an understatement, the Pittsburgh Opera website suggests that the opera needs to be seen at least twice, the plan being that each audience gets to vote on which ending gets performed in the following performance. Something like the 1985 Broadway musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in which the audience voted on alternative endings before the show was over.
As stage director Kristine McIntyre puts it, Woman With Eyes Closed checks a lot of the boxes for uniqueness. Says Higdon, “It’s so different from Cold Mountain” (her previous opera).
But like Cold Mountain — the Civil War-period grand opera, mounted by Opera Philadelphia in 2016 at the Academy of Music — the smaller-scale Woman With Eyes Closed is about taking extreme measures for survival. The inner lives of the Romanian art thieves — wily, desperate, uneducated petty criminals — is hard to imagine in an operatic medium that’s about exploring personalities in depth.
As Dye has said, this opera is not about suave figures out of the Cary Grant film To Catch a Thief. But while Higdon confronted the rhetorical problem of operatic voices singing street language — “the violence in the underlying music puts an exclamation point on it” — the main character became the mom in a tour-de-force role for contralto Meredith Arwady (often heard in Philadelphia during her years at the Curtis Institute and on the Astral Artistic Services roster).
The mom develops a relationship with the painting by Lucian Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud) that reconnects her with her mother, who was a painter. Then there’s the painting itself with its muted colors and close-up face of a woman who, as Dye puts it, might be sleeping or might be dead.
“Have her eyes been closed all along to her suffering? It’s a real turning point ... a hope for escape from her life,” said Higdon. “It’s triggering to her. Seeing the paintings makes her question a lot of things. Does she want to save her son? Does that do him favors?... What does the art mean to people who experience it?”
Her loyalty goes to her son, who has a criminal history and needs a new start. But the mystery comes from how far the mother goes. It’s a tricky problem. The operatic medium can be too weighty to accommodate that kind of ambiguity. “You see her burning something and you don’t know what it is,” said McIntyre.
Higdon is best known for neoromantic works such as the elegiac blue cathedral (a memorial for her deceased brother), but for Woman With Eyes Closed, she had to dip into a darker, less-lyrical, less-known side of her compositional personality.
Special orchestral effects mirror the colors of the paintings. Objects ranging from rubber wedges to hiking socks are imposed upon the instruments in various ways. “It should be sounds you’re not used to,” said Higdon.
For the staging, said McIntyre, “we’ve turned the entire space into a gallery. The whole show unfolds in the gallery from which the art was stolen. We’ll be doing live videos incorporated into the projections.”
The whole project, Higdon admits, feels distant from her now. She has always been prolific, but in one post-pandemic season, she had 10 premieres. Yet the day of the second cancellation is all too clear in her memory: “When I got the call about a year ago ... I didn’t get much of an explanation. That’s not unusual; composers don’t know what happened. But every arts organization in the U.S. was struggling.”
Higdon was queasy but resigned, and in good company: David Del Tredici and Virgil Thomson, two major American composers, had stillborn operatic works. What they didn’t have, though, was Pittsburgh Opera — an arrangement brokered by now-retired Curtis faculty Mikael Eliasen — a highly influential figure in the opera world.
“Woman With Eyes Closed” runs April 26 to May 4. Bitz Opera Factory, 2425 Liberty Ave., Pittsburgh. All performances are sold out. The recommendation of multiple viewings is only possible among advance ticket buyers. pittsburghopera.org