Ingmar Bergman’s film “Fanny and Alexander” luxuriates in space. In its longest version, a television mini-series that spanned more than five hours, the camera lingers on interiors that in their accumulating details say as much as the characters, who themselves say quite a lot.
Bergman made another edit of the film, of a little more than three hours, for theatrical release. But the longer “Fanny and Alexander” spends 90 minutes alone on a single Christmas Eve and morning in the lives of the loving but complicated Ekdahl family in early 20th-century Uppsala, Sweden.
Opera, too, is a slow-moving art form that luxuriates, but in different ways. Composers and singers relish sound, not sight. And so, in a new opera based on “Fanny and Alexander,” opening at La Monnaie in Brussels on Dec. 1, that Christmas scene takes half as long as it does in the TV cut. It’s one of several changes that were made for this adaptation, composed by Mikael Karlsson to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, and with a starry team that includes the director Ivo van Hove and the singers Sasha Cooke, Thomas Hampson and Anne Sofie von Otter. (The production will be streamed on multiple platforms on Dec. 13.)
Most obviously, the opera has a running time of two and a half hours, less than half that of the longer cut of the film. Still, the stage version will be recognizably “Fanny and Alexander,” Bergman’s partially autobiographical coming-of-age tale, in which fantasy lives freely alongside reality as a vast tableau of human experience is seen through the eyes of a child. Bergman, who had planned for it to be his last film, said around its release, in 1982, that it represented “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”
The film plays on television every Christmas in Sweden, and Karlsson, who is Swedish, said he felt the most pressure to get that holiday scene right. When he, Vavrek and van Hove met early in the opera’s development, van Hove suggested hurrying through Christmas to get to the wedding: the marriage of Alexander’s recently widowed mother to the local bishop, the precipitating event of the story’s darkest dramas.
“We went through the screenplay, and Ivo said, ‘I need this’ and ‘I don’t need this,’” Vavrek recalled. “Really, we were a three-headed unit, dramaturgically, from the very beginning.”
Another important decision came out of those meetings: the film’s diegetic music, such as pleasant chamber performances in the Ekdahl house and Baroque flute in the bishop’s home, would be lost.
“Very quickly we knew to skip it,” Karlsson said. “You have to have a really good point of view.”
Because of those sessions, van Hove said, he and his design team were able to begin working on the production before Karlsson had written the score. And Vavrek had a sense of where to take his English-language libretto, which would be an echo of the film without directly quoting its translation from Swedish. He wrote it at Bergman’s desk in Faro, Sweden, which he described as a “really spiritual” experience, especially because he was often in touch with the director’s son, also named Ingmar, who shared memories of his father.
For both Vavrek and Karlsson, the key to their adaptation was to capture the look and feeling of the movie with efficiency, and in new ways. During the Christmas scene, for example, Bergman’s camera slowly pans over each course of the Ekdahl holiday feast. The film script, Vavrek said, details the dishes, so he took that and wrote a chorus in which the family members list them: “The herring, the sausage, head cheese, pâté, galantines, au gratin, meatballs, purées. The cutlets, the steaks, the Christmas ham and ptarmigan.”
“There’s such beautiful poetry in the way they describe this,” Vavrek said, “and I wanted to let that be this warm, cozy language.”
Karlsson has a distinct musical palette for each of the story’s settings: the inviting Ekdahl house, the stark bishop’s house and the shop of Isak Jacobi (the children’s eventual rescuer), a lightly magical, colorful space.
Scenes at the Ekdahl house are written with a lot of chromaticism; Karlsson’s directions to the orchestra include “shimmering” and “exciting, playful, light.” But when the bishop’s house is introduced, the score turns modernist and chilly.
“In the film, when the bishop plays the flute, it’s almost this sarcastic gesture,” Karlsson said, “this cruel man seeing himself as the carrier of something beautiful. If anyone would kind of wink at modernism for a moment, it would be him. I liked the idea of treating that as the conservative world, where structure is everything.”
At the shop, Alexander stumbles upon Isak’s nephew Ismael, an otherworldly and androgynous character who, perhaps, brings about a miracle of salvation. For a vocal analogue, Karlsson wrote the role as a countertenor, sung by Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen. The sound world of Isak’s shop also includes pervasive electronics.
“Isak’s shop is where the magic happens,” said the opera’s conductor, Ariane Matiakh. “So that’s where the electronics take up more space and lead us into the world of the imagination. Of course, the orchestra always comes first, but the electronics increase the feelings and experience for the audience.”
Feelings are also elevated throughout the opera, because, Karlsson said, “everything is so extreme when you’re a child. We tried to treat every moment as if it’s a childhood experience.”
That is also a goal of van Hove, who has, with reverence and care, made theatrical adaptations of Bergman films like “Scenes From a Marriage” and the double bill of “After the Rehearsal” and “Persona.” His primary challenge here was to be as fleet as the libretto and score, while introducing each of the 14 principal characters with grace. The majority of them are at the Christmas dinner, which van Hove said was the most complicated moment for him to stage.
“It’s not that long in the end, but I spent a lot of time directing it,” he said. Like Bergman’s film, the opera moves from the Ekdahls’ family gathering to intimate vignettes in separate rooms, sometimes layering them. “Gradually,” he added, “we found a kind of unity in the different spaces, but we could, with some changes, make it feel like a different space. We do that with very few elements, to be as efficient and as poetic as possible.”
Van Hove said that as Alexander is haunted by the death of his father, his staging strives for a kind of dream world, brought to life by an enormous wall of video, that springs from his guilt and fanciful comparisons to Hamlet once his mother marries the bishop.
The guiding concept of Alexander’s intensely felt and imagined perspective runs through all the direction and scenic design. That kind of thinking, van Hove said, is in all his theater work, and is something he learned from Bergman’s films. “Every movie is different,” van Hove said. “He always looked at the material that he had written and asked, ‘How do I need to do this?’ My team and I also don’t have a style; we always look at the material.”
Ultimately, van Hove aims for this “Fanny and Alexander” to have the humanism of Bergman’s films. “It’s always about the people,” he said. “He can be heartbreaking but not sentimental, and he is not afraid of the dark side of people. I consider him one of the major artists of the 20th century because he is a realist about human emotions, but he is also poetic. And there is always something optimistic about it. Always, you know that the sun will rise in the morning.”
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