Why are so many operas by women adaptations of films by men?

Opera’s line of corpses — bloodied, battered, dumped in a bag — is a long one. Now it can add one more to the list: the broken, abused body of Bess McNeill. The heroine of Lars Von Trier’s uncompromising 1996 film is a curious creation. Striving against the restrictions of her austere, Presbyterian community on a remote Scottish island, she marries oil-worker and ‘outsider’ Jan. But when an accident on the rig leaves him paralysed, a promise to her husband and a bargain with God leads her into increasingly degrading and dangerous sexual encounters. Savant or innocent, saviour or sacrificial victim — Von Trier leaves it unclear.

Composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek’s adaptation premiered in Philadelphia in 2016 to rave reviews, and two years on the opera has already notched up multiple productions including this, its European premiere.

You can hear why. The score is endlessly attractive and easily graspable, a blend of windswept atmospherics (gulls cry in Brittenish flutes, waves roll in tumbling string scales before exploding into sharp sprays of percussion), rigid, psalm-like chants for the church elders and a freewheeling lyricism for Bess herself, sometimes anchored by the transgressive thrust and throb of the electric guitar. It’s all elegantly managed and melodically appealing, but that’s rather the problem.

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Love or hate Von Trier’s film, it tells its story with unblinking, unsentimental clarity. No soundtrack underscores the brisk scenes or editorialises the many episodes of abuse and sexual violence.

In setting the story to music, Mazzoli responds to a gap in the original, to a space created by the absent church bells banished by the elders, to the silencing of women in the services. But in supplementing the film’s silence with song, Mazzoli softens it, aestheticises it in ways that are uncomfortably familiar.