Some years back, Paul Moravec got a call from the people at the Minnesota Opera. They wanted to commission a new opera, and the wondered if he’d be interested in composing the music. Sure, he said. They started tossing out some idea for what the source material for the opera might be. One of their suggestions was “The Shining.”
“We looked a number of possibilities, and finally they proposed to me ‘The Shining’,” Moravec told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “And I thought ‘Wow, what an idea!’”
He didn’t necessarily think it was a great idea, though.
“I just thought, ‘What an idea,’” he said. “That was my immediate response. That was holding open that it might be a good idea. But it was just that it had never occurred to me. It never would have occurred to me.”
Whatever reticence he felt came because, at that point, he had only seen Stanley Kubrick’s film version of the Stephen King novel.
“Once I read the book, I understood that this was an ideal topic for an opera,” Moravec said. “I really think it’s perfect. It has all the elements that drive opera.”
Minnesota Opera suggested Mark Campbell as a librettist. Their opera version of “The Shining” premiered in 2016.
Moravec and Campbell both have stellar resumes. They’ve each won a Pulitzer Prize—Moravec for his chamber piece “Tempest Fantasy,” Campbell for his libretto for “Silent Night”—and it takes some time to scroll through the list of the operas, musicals, and concert pieces they’ve created.
Still, before the premiere a decade ago, some observers had suspicions about the opera, based as it was on an ultra-popular 20th-century horror novel. But it almost uniformly won over critics, even those who may have had a prejudice toward more classical themes in opera.
It was also, perhaps more predictably, enormously popular with audiences.
Ryan Taylor had performed as a singer at Minnesota Opera many times, and he knew its theater well. But he had just come on board as president and general director of Minnesota Opera when “The Shining” was about to premiere. In fact, it opened during his first week on the job.
“I was told the week I got here that all of the seats for ‘The Shining’ had been sold, including the standing room seats,” Taylor said. “I was like ‘What? What do you mean? Where are the standing room seats?’ I didn’t even know our theater had those.”
It’s not common for American opera companies to perform to full houses, but every performance of the world premiere run of “The Shining,” Minnesota Opera had people eager to pay money to stand for two hours.
Other opera companies have performed “The Shining” in the intervening decade, and audiences have responded enthusiastically all over the country.
Critics have responded just as favorably, praising Moravec’s evocative music, which has been noted for feeling contemporary without abandoning classical tonality, and Campbell’s chilling libretto.
Most fans of “The Shining,” either the King novel or the Kubrick movie, love it for its chills. And in fact, Taylor calls the opera “terrifying.”
But Moravec approached it as a classic opera story, and even as a romance.
“I think of opera as depending on the elements,” he said, “love, death and power. And all three of those elements are in the book on steroids. It’s very, very compelling, and very dramatic.”
Stephen King is rather famously not a fan of the Kubrick’s film, so when Moravec emailed King to get the rights to the book, he didn’t mention the film at all. Morvaec himself, though, loves both the movie and the novel.
“It’s not what Stephen King wrote,” Moravec said of the film. “I can see why Mr. King doesn’t like it. However, I think it’s a brilliant film on its own terms. It’s icy and cold but ever frame is beautiful. It’s remarkable, It’s Kubrick.
“But it’s not operatic. There’s no charter arc. There’s no trajectory. You see Jack Nicholson arching his eyebrows and you know he’s nuts, right from the beginning. There’s nowhere to go with that. In the book, it’s a real tragedy. It’s a terrible dilemma that he faces.”
Moravec said the disparate endings of the book and the movie epitomize the differences in their emotional tones.
“The movie ends frozen, right?” he sad. “It ends in ice. And the book ends in fire, with the hotel blowing up.”
But what makes the book great, Moravec said, is the human story underlying the horror. And that’s what he and Campbell have tried to do with their opera.
“Yes, it’s scary,” he said. “But I think that what Mr. King does is transcend the genre. In a lot of ways it’s a love story, and it’s about a family trying to stay together under extraordinary duress. Yes, there are elements of horror in it, but I think of it as just a great story, a very compelling drama.”
The horror of the novel comes through in the opera, but in a somewhat different way.
“The scariness in the opera comes from the unease one feels through the music as the drama of the story progresses,” Moravec said.”There aren’t a lot of jump scares and things like that. That’s hard to do on stage anyway. But it is faithful to the book in that sense of gnawing dread that processes throughout.”
For Opera Tampa, which is celebrating its 30th season, “The Shining” is the second entry in a four-opera mainstage season of operas with supernatural stories. The mainstage season started with an elegant staging of Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” is scheduled to open Feb. 27 and the season concludes in April with Giuseppe Verdi’s “Macbeth.”
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This article appears in Jan. 29 – Feb. 04.