Academy Award-winning composer Howard Shore, Placido Domingo and director David Cronenberg are forming an unlikely trio to create an unlikely opera — "The Fly."
A co-production by the Theatre du Chatelet and Domingo's Los Angeles Opera, "The Fly" will premiere in Paris on July 1, 2008, and open the Los Angeles Opera's 2008-9 season that Sept. 7. Domingo will conduct both runs.
"`The Fly' will be an unprecedented addition to the operatic repertoire," Domingo, the general director of the Los Angeles Opera, said at Friday's announcement. "Any commission of an opera is a gamble, as has been proven throughout music history. There are many operas which were commissioned and premiered but didn't survive the test of time.
"Thus, there is no scientific formula for commissioning but only one's instinct when one listens to a composers already existing works. I have heard many of Howard Shore's scores for such films as `The Lord of the Rings' (for which he won three Oscars) and, of course, `The Fly,' and knew that here was a musician who should write an opera."
The two-act opera is being drawn mainly from Cronenberg's 1986 movie of that name, which recounts the genetic mutation of a scientist into a fly. The director radically transformed a 1958 film based on a short story by George Langelaan.
Having Shore, Domingo and Cronenberg together is "the symbol of a musical world on the move," said Jean-Luc Choplin, director of the Theatre du Chatelet.
The work will feature three main characters: a lead baritone, tenor and a mezzo-soprano. Domingo said it was Shore who came up with the idea of turning the movie into opera.
"The Fly" is an "intimate story" of love, death and "the ultimate sacrifice," Shore said.
"I thought it was a very good opera subject for staging and I wanted to work with something I knew," Shore said. "I love the emotion of opera" and Cronenberg's movie "allows you this canvas to work on to create something new."
The opera, originally intended for the Los Angeles Opera's 2007-8 season, has a libretto by Tony winner David Henry Hwang. Oscar winner Dante Ferretti will design the sets.
