Breaking the Waves: Lars von Trier's 'genuine romance story' turns into a musical show
the first major opera based on a film by Lars von Trier is set to debut this week, but don’t look for the famously provocative Danish director – and noted opera lover – to have a hand in the work itself. With Breaking the Waves, composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek have adapted von Trier’s bleak 1996 fable set in an insular Calvinist community on the coast of Scotland. The work that introduced the director to the world at large, and a modern arthouse classic, it establishes themes that became constants in his later films – religious piety and obsessive love endured by a suffering heroine. The work opens at Opera Philadelphia on Thursday. “One of the things I love about this film is that each of the characters is infinitely deep and incredibly complicated,” said Mazzoli, speaking at a recent preview for the opera at New York’s Guggenheim museum. “That’s a very attractive quality for opera.” Von Trier has periodically used opera’s heightened emotions in his films, no...