Carlisle Floyd's Wuthering Heights Revival Over-Ambitious

Some years ago we posted about the possibility of a production of Carlisle Floyd's opera Wuthering Heights in Anchorage, Alaska. It seems that the information was too optimistic. The Anchorage Daily News reports:

Perusing opera scores on e-bay, she stumbled upon "Wuthering Heights" by Carlisle Floyd. Floyd is America's pre-eminent living opera composer, whose "Susannah" and "Of Mice and Men" have been particularly successful. But "Wuthering Heights" is an obscurity. Tilly had never heard of it and could find no recording. But she got the score and was bowled over by it.
She called one of her former teachers, conductor Gregory Buchalter. She told him she was starting an opera company in Fairbanks and could he come up and conduct "Wuthering Heights." The idea was to make a splash by producing the first recording of it.
Those aspirations turned out to be over-ambitious. Nonetheless, the proposal got the company off the ground. Buchalter stepped in as artistic and music director as well as conductor and has worked to develop a more practical step-by-step plan for the organization.
(That plan doesn't include "Wuthering Heights," though Floyd and his first Susannah, Phyllis Curtain, are both listed as Opera Fairbanks "directors emeritus," out-of-state experts who consult with the company.) (...)
"I was a little naive with 'Wuthering Heights,' " [Cassandra] Tilly confessed. "But, four years later, we have a company and it's still developing. The first season I was cautiously optimistic. Now it's taken off like a rocket." (Mike Dunham)

Eyeweekly has an enigmatic review of the play Maude-Lynne Sells Out! by Morgan Norwich & Johnnie Walker:

Morgan Norwich is both magnetic and gut-busting as Maude-Lynne, a reclusive retro-fetishist who sells bootleg movies and Victorian literature from her mom’s basement to make ends meet. An enigma, she speaks with a 19th century parlance but has her Tweets relayed to her on a futuristic headset, and pines for a Wuthering Heights-style romance yet dates a keyboard-playing comic book dork (Peter Cavell). (Alex Nino Gheciu)

The Daily Express reviews a new edition of The Virago Book of the Joy of Shopping:

The Joy Of Shopping collates wit and wisdom from a miscellany of (mostly) women into themed chapters. There are excerpts from novels by Barbara Pym, Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf alongside a Dolly Parton lyric and nurse Kate Phipps's 1940 diary entry on rationing ("Went to London today to do Xmas shopping because, after all, one never knows how long one's favourite shops will be standing. John Lewis is a blackened skeleton") (Charlotte Heathcote)

Twilight zone today:

In each book, she has Bella reading a classic that parallels her story. In Eclipse, she’s reading Wuthering Heights, which Edward dismisses as being not about love but about hate. If you disregard its classic status, Wuthering Heights is actually pretty silly, with mad characters doing terrible things to each other. And yet it is prescribed by university lecturers who would dismiss Meyer out of hand. (Kate Hoole in The Witness)

There’s really not much reason for me to go on at length about this third (of four) installments in the review-proof Twilight series, given that the diehard fans of the franchise are second only to Harry Potter’s in terms of brand loyalty. The movie is based on the Stephenie Meyer best seller which in turn was ostensibly-inspired by Emily Brontë’s gothic novel “Wuthering Heights.” (Kam Williams in EUR Film Review)

We can place this article in The National (United Arab Emirates) also in the Twilight zone (with a BIG blunder) :

And it’s not only bloodthirsty adventures that have received such treatment. Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (SIC!) hit the bestseller lists all over again last year when it was republished with a by-now very familiar white rose on its pitch black cover. (Ben East)

The Daily Mail recommends a visit to Haworth in order to participate in the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the premiere of the film The Railway Children. The Vine carries a story with a Jane Eyre reference. a thousand Books with Quotes posts about Wuthering Heights, تهران فیلمز presents an Iranian DVD edition of Jane Eyre 2006 and Les Brontë à Paris reviews Wuthering Heights 1992 in French.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Opera, References, Wuthering Heights