There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie in which Tippi Hedren is emptying a safe while a cleaning lady silently drags her mop towards her. Can Hedren, playing the disturbed Marnie, slip down the stairs before the woman turns her head?
I felt a twinge of the same panic last week interviewing the composer Nico Muhly, whose opera Marnie — based more closely on Winston Graham’s novel than on Hitchcock’s film — was given its world première by English National Opera last Saturday. Would I make it out of the room without asking the Wrong Question?
Muhly, who made his name as the cherubic, prodigiously gifted but prickly protégé of Philip Glass, is scary to interview. This is well known in New York. Even those critics who don’t like his music admire the cheeky brutality of his wit. They just don’t want to be his targets.
His first opera, Two Boys, about internet predators, was written in his twenties and performed at ENO and then the Met. Envious colleagues hoped it would get bad reviews. There were a few — mostly mocking the libretto — but not enough to satisfy them.
He’s in his mid-thirties now, though there’s still a touch of boyband cuteness about him. I decided not to raise the subject of middle age. You just have to visit his website to discover how he reacts to interviewers who get up his nose.
He blogs about an unnamed music hack who couldn’t get his head round Muhly’s musical promiscuity — studying with the minimalists, playing in a band with Sufjan Stevens, anthems for Anglican worship. The journo asked portentous written questions that tried to attach Muhly to a post-minimalist-cum-rock-band ‘movement’.
Big mistake. ‘You and this movement shit again. It’s so lazy and it makes me want to throw the laptop across the room… you’ve created this artificial “scene” and then put me as the family crayzee cousin, always writin’ wacky music for the Lord’s House!’
Yikes.
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