In 2022, Renée Fleming made her highly anticipated return to the Metropolitan Opera in New York when she starred alongside Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O’Hara in the world premiere of Kevin Puts’ opera The Hours.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer based on his opera on Michael Cunningham’s acclaimed 1998 novel of the same name, which was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 book Mrs Dalloway. In 2002, Stephen Daldry adapted Cunningham’s novel into a film, starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. The powerful story follows three women: Clarissa Vaughan, a book editor living in contemporary New York; Laura Brown, a postwar housewife in Los Angeles, who is reading Mrs Dalloway; and Virginia Woolf herself.
The opera, which has a libretto by Greg Pierce, moves back and forth through time in similar fashion, as the three women grapple with their demons.
Renée Fleming, who put the idea for the opera to Puts, talks to Limelight about The Hours, as it arrives in select Australian cinemas as part of The Met: Live in HD.
Renée Fleming in The Hours at the Metropolitan Opera, 2022. Photo © Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera
In 2017, you sang your farewell...
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