With a time-tested, classic opera, we mostly know what will happen at the end. There are classic tropes—the tragic heroine beset by grief takes her own life, tragedy is narrowly avoided through the power of love and friendship, or in the case of Wagner’s Ring cycle, destruction makes way for the possibility of a new beginning. Woman with Eyes Closed, a world premiere at the Pittsburgh Opera this spring, plays with our expectations of how a story should end with the possibility of three endings. Attendees won’t know which one they’re walking into when they go to see the show during its run of April 26 to May 4.
Woman With Eyes Closed Explores Real Life Art Heist
Librettist Jennifer Higdon took inspiration for this ending not to use it as a gimmick, but to explore the “what if” that plagues all of us about our decision-making. “Everyone’s had to make a big decision at some point, one that affects the rest of their life,” Pittsburgh Opera director of Marking and Communications Chris Cox told TABLE. “Choosing what to do in those situations can be incredibly hard, because you know the stakes are high. Or maybe choosing what to do is easy, but actually doing it is hard.”
The story follows Mona, a woman who finds a mysterious suitcase full of paintings she knows to be stolen. The thief is no stranger, though. It’s her own son. One of the paintings, Lucian Freud’s Woman with Eyes Closed, resembles Mona’s mother, bringing up memories she previously wished to forget. Mona then needs to decide what to do: Turn her son in and save the artworks, or keep her son’s secret while the artworks vanish from public life?
Higdon drew from real life art heists, including one from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal Museum in 2012 where three Romanians pled guilty to stealing work by Picasso, Monet, and Matisse—and the real life Woman With Eyes Closed. One of the thieves left the paintings with his mother, inspiring the setting for Woman With Eyes Closed.
The Value of Art
Woman With Eyes Closed explores the value of art and questions of institutional ownership, highly relevant ones for anyone visiting a museum in today’s world. “Let’s say a museum buys and insures a painting for a million dollars; then it’s stolen and destroyed. If the insurance company sends them a million dollars, in one sense it looks like the museum came out even – now they can use that million dollars to buy a different painting,” Cox said. “But that specific artwork is gone and will never be seen again by anyone. How much does humanity lose? Does all humanity lose equally?”
Artist Gala Porras-Kim looks at these questions with a similar angle in her exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art, The reflection at the threshold of a categorical division, running through July 27. If you go see Woman With Eyes Closed and find the questions in it thought-provoking, Porras-Kim’s exhibition is a great addendum. In the show, she asks why some objects in the museum’s collection are “natural history,” others “art,” and what the value of having archival pieces no one will ever see is. She asked curatorial professionals what the “least likely to be on view” object in their museum was, showing that museums, bastions of culture, don’t just hold masterworks but also objects as absurd as a box of preserved fleas.
A World Premiere: A Brand New Opera
Woman With Eyes Closed is a world premiere, meaning it’s not Madama Butterfly or La Boheme, but a brand-new opera by a living artist. “There are considerable challenges marketing a world premiere because there are no materials to help with promotion – no photographs, no reviews, no scholarly articles,” Pittsburgh Opera General Director Christopher Hahn said.
He added: “Sometimes people can be skittish about something they haven’t heard and seen before. This is why it is so important for us to build up real trust with our supporters and audiences.” A world premiere can then go on to other venues, but seeing in its first run is key. “[Audiences] need to know that if Pittsburgh Opera takes on a world premiere they fully trust us to deliver a thought-provoking and fascinating addition to the rich world of opera.”
Woman With Eyes Closed is a window into the world of contemporary opera from a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. Part of why the show has three endings is that the real-life situation is still ongoing, with no clear or clean conclusion in sight. Stories have to have endings, and they provide catharsis where real life rarely has as neat a bow on it. But Woman With Eyes Closed explores how at times, there is no “right” choice, only the one you make. It’s worth seeing the opera few times to see which of Mona’s choices you see yourself in. “Anyone remotely interested in psychology or philosophy will find a lot to ponder and discuss after seeing this show,” Cox said.
Story by Emma Riva
Cover Photo: Woman with Eyes Closed (2002) by Lucian Freud, accessed via Artchive
Subscribe to TABLE Magazine’s print edition.
