BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN Opera, With Libretto by Annie Proulx, Premieres Tonight in Madrid

Gerard Mortier and the New York City Opera have commissioned Charles Wuorinen, an American composer, to turn Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain into a work for the operatic stage. Proulx wrote the libretto, and Wuorinen completed the opera in 2012. The premiere was postponed after New York City Opera's General Director, Gerard Mortier, resigned. The project was then again taken up by Mortier at the Teatro Real in Madrid and is set to premiere today, January 28, 2014.

Edna Annie Proulx, born 22 August 1935, is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994, and was made into a film in 2001. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards.

"Brokeback Mountain" was originally published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997, and was subsequently published in a slightly expanded version in Proulx's 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories. The story won an O. Henry Award prize (third place) in 1998. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain" in 1998. The collection was named a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted the story for the film of the same name, released in 2005. At that time, the short story and the screenplay were published together, along with essays by Proulx and the screenwriters, in Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay. The story was also published separately in book form.

For more information on the opera, visit www.teatro-real.com.