Two Boys

The Metropolitan Opera
Through Nov. 14

New York

A scene from Nico Muhly's 'Two Boys,' which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Nico Muhly's opera "Two Boys" seems to have all the elements for success: a gifted young composer (he is 32), a story about a contemporary phenomenon (the Internet) and a splashy, multimedia production. Commissioned through the joint Met/LCT New Works Program, a collaboration between the Metropolitan Opera and the Lincoln Center Theater, it has been through four development workshops and was given its world premiere by the English National Opera in June 2011, all affording ample opportunities to have the kinks worked out of it. The result, greeted with an enthusiastic ovation at its Met premiere on Monday, is polished and safe, an unthreatening evening in the theater.

Set in 2001, in the early period of mass Internet use, the opera, which is based on a true story, begins with a crime. A teenage boy (Brian) stabs a younger boy (Jake) to death, supposedly on instructions from a group of people he encountered on the Web. It turns out that Jake has engineered his own homicide, adopting different online personas and enticing the credulous Brian with declarations of love and increasingly lurid tales of spying and murder.

The investigating detective, Anne Strawson, does not understand Internet culture; Brian tells her the story in a series of flashbacks.


A preview of "Two Boys," an opera by Nico Muhly that explores the dark side of the internet and opens Oct. 21 at the Metropolitan Opera.


The opera plays like an episode of "Law & Order" with music, but the music, though ear-pleasingly tonal and accomplished, never makes a visceral connection. The libretto, by playwright Craig Lucas, is tight and swiftly paced; the online chat exchanges between Brian and Jake's various avatars lend themselves to short text lines. Atmospheric orchestral music helps to build suspense and make Brian's enchantment somewhat credible, but it works more like a film score, supporting the words and story, rather than creating its own world. Mr. Muhly's most distinctive writing is in the choruses, which conjure up an infinite online universe of voices, babbling incomprehensible words and overlapping into an unearthly shimmer.

In more traditional aria writing, Mr. Muhly's vocal lines tend to be pretty but shapeless. Most of these are for the principal adult character, Anne, and her confusion and anxiety about Internet culture mostly makes her a stand-in for the older generation. "Everything's ironic," she complains. "They've killed off beauty. There's no tenderness. There's nothing. Ghosts in machines."

She has a back story (a child given up for adoption years before, a life devoted to work), but despite the superb performance of mezzo Alice Coote, we are less interested in her than in the child who creates the whole mess. And Jake, hauntingly sung by a boy soprano, Andrew Pulver, is a cipher. We figure out that he is in love with Brian, but we never really feel his pain. (For a great mystery/ghost story opera that musically explores the intersection of a confused adult woman and a boy soprano, see Benjamin Britten's "The Turn of the Screw.")

Bartlett Sher's production is sharp and quick-moving, shifting between realities. Michael Yeargen's set uses several large towers that go flat and gray for the "real world" scenes in the police station, hospital and Anne's home, but become translucent and light up with scrolling chat transcripts for the online conversations. The video and animation by 59 Productions conjures up the early, mostly text-based, Internet world—so primitive by today's standards that it seems quaint—and suggests the universe of infinite connectivity with tumbling polygons and helices. Donald Holder's lighting and Catherine Zuber's costumes also contribute to the sense of possibility that exists outside the dull "real world" for the adolescent protagonists. So do the dancers, choreographed by Hofesh Shechter, who animate the choral sections (the chorus members are motionless, holding laptops) with undulating motion.

Tenor Paul Appleby gave a credible performance as the 16-year-old Brian—much of it reactive, and hunched over a laptop. He was easy prey for 13-year-old Jake's creations: the bright-voiced Jennifer Zetlan as Rebecca, a teenage siren in peril; the seductive Sandra Piques Eddy as the threatening secret agent Fiona; the handsome Christopher Bolduc as Jake's idealized self; and the hard-edged Keith Miller as the murderous Peter. Of the clueless parents, Caitlin Lynch stood out as Jake's mother, with her lyrical, heartbroken mourning for her unusual son. Conductor David Robertson led the well-coordinated, carefully paced performance.

It was all clean and engaging, but it may not bridge the opera-house generational divide. A puzzled elderly woman asked me afterward, "Why did he kill him?" And a representative of the target Millennial generation felt it was an old person's view of the Internet, commenting, "As someone who spends a lot of time on the Internet, I'm a little offended."


"Two Boys" is the first of the Met/LTC New Works operas to reach the Metropolitan Opera stage. Launched in 2006, the program provides $50,000 and the guarantee of a workshop to a promising composer-librettist team, with the hope that the piece will be suitable for one of the two companies. Of the initial dozen projects, only four, including "Two Boys," reached the workshop stage, though two others, by Jeanine Tesori and Ricky Ian Gordon, are still in development. Three new composers, Matthew Aucoin, Joshua Schmidt and David T. Little (composer of "Dog Days"), were brought into the program this fall.

Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, feels that one full-fledged opera out of the program so far is a good result. The company has a vigorous continuing engagement with new work in several areas, including scheduled new productions of John Adams's "The Death of Klinghoffer" and Kaija Saariaho's "L'Amour de Loin," both of which will probably challenge Met audiences more than "Two Boys."

Ms. Waleson writes about opera for the Journal.