‘Brokeback’ to become an opera

“Brokeback Mountain,” the Annie Proulx short story that became an Academy Award-winning film, is soon to become an opera. New York City Opera general manager-designate Gerard Mortier has announced that composer Charles Wuorinen will write an opera version of the story for the company’s 2013 spring season.

“Ever since encountering Annie Proulx’s extraordinary story I have wanted to make an opera on it,” Wuorinen said in a statement.

The opera will mark the second company world premiere for the composer, whose “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” an adaptation of the Salman Rushdie novel, premiered at New York City Opera in 2004.

Directed by Ang Lee, the 2005 movie costarred the late Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy who fall in love on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming in 1963.

-- Diane Haithman