Heathcliff as Mirror to Community Failure

Gramophone talks about the upcoming production (for the first time) of John Joubert's Jane Eyre opera and interviews the director of the production:

This summer, John Joubert’s final opera is fully staged for the first time. Director Eleanor Burke tells us how memory, music, and sustainability converge in a radical reimagining of Brontë’s classic – and how a labour of love finally reaches the stage.

For decades, John Joubert’s opera Jane Eyre sat in relative obscurity – completed over ten years in the 1980s and premiered in concert in 2016, it was a labour of love born not from commission but from deep personal passion. A South African-born British composer, Joubert was best known for his choral music, though his operatic output – of which Jane Eyre was the eighth – remains substantial for a post-war British composer. He died in 2019 at the age of 91 Now, for the first time, the opera comes to the stage in a fully realised production at the Arcola Theatre as part of this year’s Grimeborn Festival. Directed by Eleanor Burke for Green Opera, this long-awaited staging is as much about creative resurrection as it is about radical reinterpretation.

‘The opera wasn’t written for a commission,’ says director Eleanor Burke. ‘It was just something John and Ken worked on over more than a decade, purely out of love for the book.’ Joubert and librettist Kenneth Birkin began developing Jane Eyre from 1987 to '97, corresponding by letter – over 700 of them are archived at the British Library – as they shaped the libretto and score. ‘It feels like a real labour of love,’ Burke adds. ‘That slow, careful process gives it a kind of sincerity you can really feel.’

But this Jane Eyre is not your textbook period drama. Burke and her team have embraced the opera’s fragmentary structure – beginning as Jane leaves Lowood rather than charting her full life – and reimagined it as a memory play, where episodes resurface like flashes of a vivid, turbulent inner world. ‘It’s emotionally urgent,’ Burke explains. ‘We’re not trying to be comprehensive. We’re following Jane through the memories that made her.’ (...)

The opera has been reorchestrated for a chamber ensemble (string quartet, harp, horn, bassoon, piano, and more) by Thomas Ang (who previously reorchestrated Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle for Green Opera’s 5-star 2022 production), making it both agile and immersive – ideal for Arcola’s Studio 1. Kenneth Woods, who conducted the opera’s concert premiere, returns to lead the performances, sharing the podium with current Royal Opera Jette Parker Artist Peggy Wu. (Jonathan Whiting)

The Indiependent discusses the humour (intentional or not) of the Gothic genre:

“On opening the little door,” recounts Wuthering Heights’ Mr Lockwood, “two hairy monsters flew at my throat, bearing me down, and extinguishing the light; while a mingled guffaw from Heathcliff and Hareton put the copestone on my rage and humiliation.” Mockery abounds in Emily Brontë’s 1847 Gothic novel, with comparatively little wholesome laughter. Indeed, Brontë invites the reader to deride the hapless Lockwood; his farcical entry throws into relief the bleak atmosphere of the Heights. It’s a darkly humorous opening that accentuates the wickedness to come.

Aspects of the upcoming film adaptation have been met with some derision, which, unlike Brontë, the director probably didn’t intend for. Whether the movie will be unintentionally comical remains to be seen. (Andrew Whitfield)

Keighley News reminds us of next Sunday's event at the Haworth moors. The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever turned into a protest against the Calder Wind Farm proposal: 

The event, on July 27, also invokes music legend Kate Bush, coinciding with the annual The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever in celebration of the artist’s number one hit Wuthering Heights.

Last year, Calder Wind Farm Ltd submitted a scoping document to Calderdale Council outlining proposals which, in the company’s revised form, would see 41 giant turbines sited at Walshaw Moor.

Campaigners opposing the proposals are concerned about the impact the wind farm might have on peatland and the moorland habitat, including nesting birds, and its impact visually.

The dancers – in flowing red dresses –  will evoke the spirit of both Emily Brontë and Kate Bush, whose Wuthering Heights song topped the UK charts in 1978.

They will be dancing on the moorland surrounding Top Withens, reputedly the inspiration for the setting of the classic novel. (John Greenwood)

Front Porch Republic makes Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff in particular, an example of how communities that fail to welcome and integrate outsiders create the very destructive forces they fear:

In a fragmented age increasingly seduced by the cult of the self, "Wuthering Heights" challenges us to reclaim the difficult virtues that make real community possible.

Literary anti-heroes can seem romantic: Holden Caulfield, Hamlet, Meursault, and, chief amongst these brooding men, Wuthering Heights’s Heathcliff. Heathcliff emerges from the pages like a dark elemental force—a creature as wild and ungovernable as the Yorkshire moors that shape and shelter him. Found as a nameless orphan and absorbed reluctantly into a fragile household, he grows into a figure of feral passion and relentless vengeance, unmoored from any communal obligation or moral restraint.

Neither fully villain nor tragic hero, Heathcliff embodies a radical individualism so absolute that it corrodes every relationship and every patch of land he touches. His love, fierce and possessive, curdles into hatred; his longing for belonging twists into a campaign of generational revenge. In Heathcliff, we confront the terrifying specter of a soul severed from the common good—a man who forsakes reconciliation and stewardship for the consuming fire of his own wounded will. Through Heathcliff’s alienation, Wuthering Heights serves as a dark meditation on what happens when personal grievance overtakes the common good, echoing contemporary concerns about atomization and social fragmentation. (Read more) (Raleigh Adams)

The Leader describes a book club meeting in a bar in The Heights, Houston: 

You might think that a book club hosted by a bar wouldn’t talk much about the book, but you would be wrong.

On a recent Wednesday, more than a dozen people settled in at Benny Thunders, 605 Columbia St., in the Heights to delve into the club’s summer classic read - and toxic love study - Wuthering Heights. Over beer and wine from the self-pour taproom, the group hashed out the same questions you might have had if you were ever assigned it in high school English.

Was Catherine truly in love with Heathcliff, or was she a psychopath? Was Heathcliff a hero, or the devil? Why is every character in this novel so messed up? (Betsy Denson)

Les Inrockuptibles (France) asks the writer Emmanuelle Bayamach-Tam about her summer readings:

J’ai prévu de lire Les Hauts de Hurlevent, qui s’empoussière chez moi depuis des décennies, dans une édition de poche à la couverture très Dark Romance. C’est peut-être cette illustration orageuse qui m’a tenue éloignée du roman d’Emily Brontë. À moins que je n’aie eu le sentiment de l’avoir lu sans l’avoir lu. Les Hauts de Hurlevent, tout le monde sait à peu près de quoi il retourne. Catherine, Heathcliff, la lande, la passion, la vengeance… Et puis je suis tombée sur ce passage, illustre semble-t-il, mais qui avait échappé à mes radars jusqu’ici : ‘Nelly, je suis Heathcliff ! Il est toujours, toujours dans mon esprit ; non comme un plaisir, pas plus que je ne suis toujours un plaisir pour moi-même, mais comme mon propre être. Ainsi, ne parlez plus de notre séparation ; elle est impossible…’ Ma décision est prise : je vais enfin lire Les Hauts de Hurlevent. (Translation) (Sylvie Tanette)

The New York Times has this question for you:

Which area of England, known for its moors, was the family home of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell Brontë? (J. D. Biersdorfer)

Music Radar talks about Hole's song, Violet: 

The lyrics in Violet have attracted much scrutiny and controversy over the years.

Love stated that the song had been partially influenced by poems by Alexander Pope, specifically The Dunciad, and Emily Brontë. (Amit Sharma)

The Guardian is all about literary pseudonyms:

Pen names have a long history. Now Liadan Ní Chuinn is shunning publicity in an industry that demands ever more exposure. (...)

Writing anonymously or under a pseudonym is a long-established custom in publishing. Jane Austen’s novels were attributed to “a Lady”, Mary Ann Evans went by George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters were Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. (Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett)

Other, less protest-oriented, MWHDE events; The Hunts Post, KentLive, The Isle of Thanet News...