The British film-maker, painter and wandering intellectual Peter Greenaway has been writing love letters to a Dutchman who died more than three hundred years ago. Greenaway is best known as the creator of such teasingly opaque and sporadically violent films as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. But he has also shown a surprisingly intense interest – surprising, that is, given his apparently contradictory preoccupation with such themes as cannibalism and polymorphously perverse sex with nuns and animals – in the great seventeenth-century artist Johannes Vermeer. His 1982 film A Zed and Two Noughts included several tableaux-vivants based on paintings by the master of the becalmed domestic idyll. Now Greenaway has written the libretto for Writing to Vermeer, an unusual and ingenious epistolary opera about the artist and his family. Created in collaboration with the composer Louis Andriessen, it has its USA premiere at the State Theater on July 8 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

 

Writing to Vermeer is the latest addition to what has by now grown into a veritable (if variable) canon of works inspired by the work of the most celebrated painter ever to have been born in the small Dutch town of Delft. This mini-tradition was initiated by Marcel Proust when, in Volume 9 of Remembrance of Things Past, he had Bergotte expire in the principal museum of The Hague, the Mauritshuis, while contemplating Vermeer’s View of Delft. In 1952 Lawrence Gowing made his own contribution to the genre by publishing a passionate and deeply personal study, Vermeer, which remains one of the few monographs on the work of a painter to qualify as a work of art in its own right; while in 1991 the distinguished Polish poet and author Zbigniew Herbert published a book...

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