Ruders: Selma Jezkova

Dancer is dark but captivating
The well known Danish Composer Poul Ruders was so taken with the 2000 Lars von Triers movie "Dancer in the Dark" starring Icelandic actress/pop star Bjork, that he was compelled to develop the story into opera. This DVD of the Ruders rendition, "Selma Jezkova" is dark, emotional, taut and captivating. The story is both simple and somewhat disturbing. The title character, Selma, is a young woman with a degenerative eye disease (macular perhaps) that will eventually render her blind. Her young son, Gene, was born with same condition. Selma is a young, single mother who works very hard for very little in a factory and has saved up enough money to bring her son to America. Selma is befriended by a coworker Kathy who shows great sympathy to Selma. The story takes a turn for the darkest when a different friend, Bill, who turns out to be a bit unscrupulous discovers that Selma does have some money that he too could use. In a pivotal scene for both the film as well as the opera, Bill is shot...

Selma Jezkova/ Poul Ruders/ Dacapo
The DVD version of the opera Selma Jezkova by Poul Ruders is based on the central character of Lars von Trier's (and Bjork's) Dancer in the Dark. First of all, there are many crazy people who love opera for a lot of crazy self immolation-type reasons. I'm one of those nutty people who think opera is only about music---libretto a lot less--and singers, staging etc. etc. at the bottom--the latter can never save or make an opera. Having gotten my bias out of the way, Poul Ruders is a very competent composer--- the score skillfully sets the text from moment to moment, but there is no really strong dramatic shape or contour of this 70 minute, some-what truncated opera. Even more important, stylistically this music has nothing to do mid/late 20th century America and everything to do with the psycho-hyper expressionism of Berg's Wozzeck or even Schoenberg's Erwartung. (early 20th C. Vienna). Although many modern operas, for some reason, have this university sanctioned, politically correct...



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