The star composer discusses how the internet mirrors Greek mythology, his great love of catfishing stories and polygamist blogs, and his new opera, Two Boys , which will bring the ‘net to the Met on Oct. 21.
Matthew Murphy courtesy of Bedroom Community
Nico Muhly, one of the most eminent composers working today at the age of only 32, has been obsessed with catfishing long before the word "catfishing" meant anything other than casting a line into water.
This passion for stories of internet misrepresentation has recently manifested itself in his new opera, Two Boys, which will premiere at the Metropolitan Opera on Oct. 21 after a very successful run at the English National Opera in 2011. Based on a true story, it follows a relationship steeped in the kind of artifice that's specific to anonymous relationships on the internet, and details what can happen when that spirals violently out of control. BuzzFeed spoke with him about using the centuries-old medium of opera to tell a modern (but also kind of timeless) story of love and deception.
BuzzFeed: How did you first become aware of the story on which Two Boys is based?
Nico Muhly: I was an obsessive follower of internet crimes when they first started happening, and this original story was this confusing thing where there was a ton of coverage boy who had been murdered, and all of a sudden, the news coverage stopped, which means that something flipped — you can't publish the name of minors if they're a perpetrator of a crime, and something happened in the story where it was just like, "Oh! No more." So I was picking at the surface of this thing, and eventually more details came out, but in the meantime, all these other things started happening. There was also the case of Megan Meier, the girl who killed herself because her next door neighbor's mom pretended to be a 16-year-old boy [and harassed her online]. In the early days of this type of stuff, no one really knew what the hell was going on. Now it's kind of a thing—like, we all know what catfishing is — but in the Wild West days of those chatrooms, there was no precedent for that kind of thing.
BF: Have you ever had experiences anonymously talking to people online?
NM: Yes and no. When I was in high school, I would entertain it as a joke for a minute, but it never went further. I have a pretty strong bullshit meter, but also a pretty strong mortification anxiety! I never let it get as far as one of these stories. It's funny, because how old are you?
BF: I'm 22.
NM: Well, I'm 32, and so we have very different relationships with the technology. For me, I was already in high school by the time there was an idea that you could get it in your house. Then Craig [Lucas, the librettist of Two Boys] got to come at it from another totally different angle, since he was an adult then.
BF: What intrigues you so much about internet crime and Munchausen by internet?
NM: Munchausen by internet is so interesting because a lot of it concerns "cancer grifters," which are like my favorite thing to read about. SO many of these fake online things turn into cancer grifting. Even our story turns into cancer grifting! The little boy at the end tells the other boy, "Oh, I've got brain cancer, and I don't think I'm going to last for longer than two weeks," which in turn allows the older boy to be like, "Oh, it's OK if I stab him." It's an emotional cancer grift. For me, what's interesting about the whole thing is as it relates to art — the history of plays and the history of mythology. It's always disguise, right? Like, Zeus comes in the form of a swan to get some pussy. Zeus is always dressing up as other people to either get some pussy, or some land in that weird Greek fealty way, like, a temple would be rededicated to him. There's a political and a sexual element to it. In plays, you have things where people pretend to be dead so they can hear what people say about them, or hide behind the curtain in Hamlet or whatever. In tons of operas, the entire plot hinges on a physical disguise being used to find out the truth about something. That's, for me, where it gets interesting, because what you're required to do as an audience member is go along with the fact that a character is supposed to be unrecognizable to the other characters in a totally blatant disguise.
The fun thing with the internet is that you can disguise a person for real in literal space. The idea of body doubles and all those things... those can really happen on the internet! So it was this perfect, attractive way to tell a very old story with a new delivery system. One thing I've been struggling with, with this piece, is that everyone goes, "It's an opera about the internet!" Well, no! It's about the same thing that people have been doing since the beginning of time, which is feeling lonely and trying to figure out what to do about that. It so happens that with online relationships, you can get away with a deeper level of deception than you could physically because a person doesn't know what they're looking at. You can make up and control what other people see. In a sense, the kid [Two Boys is based on] created an opera. He created the teenage girl, the old lady, and all these other different stock opera characters. So [making Two Boys] felt like the perfect 3D thing to do.
