By Minnesota Opera

On April 16, Minnesota Opera will unveil its highly anticipated new production of a gothic romance by a Hollywood legend: Bernard Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights. You may not recognize his name, but you know Bernard Herrmann’s work. His first film score was for Orson Welles’ iconic masterpiece, Citizen Kane. He wrote the music for Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films, including North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Psycho, The Birds, Vertigo and many more. His final score, finished just days before he died in 1975, was for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. He was a musical giant whose genius infuses Hollywood history. But his brilliant – and only – opera, Wuthering Heights, was never performed in his lifetime. For film lovers and opera lovers alike, Minnesota Opera’s new production is the don’t-miss event of the season.  In a quirk of history, Herrmann composed much of Wuthering Heights in Minneapolis in 1948 while spending time with his muse, the first-cousin of his wife. Through funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, this production of Wuthering Heights will be shot in HD video by Emmy Award-winning director Joe Brandmeier.  In another odd twist, stage director Eric Simonson won an Academy Award for best documentary short for his film A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Erwin Corwin.  The film is about Corwin’s radio masterpiece A Note of Triumph that was broadcast across the country and heard by 60 million Americans on May 8, 1945, the day that World War II ended in Europe. The twist is that Bernard Herrmann composed the score for Corwin’s radio program, the subject of Simonson’s Academy Award-winning film.