"Lost Highway", The Opera?

According to the New York Times, 35-year-old Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth has loved David Lynch ever since she was 13, when she watched "The Elephant Man". As she grew, she became even more enamored of his dark, wandering films - enamored to the point that she's adapted "Lost Highway" as an opera, which is currently screening in her Venetian hometown of Graz.

The movie "Lost Highway", which has been compared to Hitchcock's "Vertigo", puzzled audiences and critics. Many fans of the movie have their own interpretation of its events. Composer Neuwirth sees it thusly: "For me, Fred converts into Pete to try again, to have a better life, to be younger and more attractive to this unattainable woman," Ms. Neuwirth said. "So he enters this world of phantasma. But Alice is just another Renee. Again he has to kill."

The movie is split evenly into two halves which are tenuously related. Neuwirth's play is also split. The first half is like a play in that the actors speak their lines, but in the second half, the lines are sung. But the composer did make a few changes: she changed Bill Pullman's character Fred from a sax player to a trumpeter. "Fred is a trumpet player because I am a trumpet player," Ms. Neuwirth said. "His story became mine, true for me, my lost highway."

Source: New York Times