Bringing the Magic of ‘Fanny and Alexander’ to the Opera Stage

Ingmar Bergman’s film “Fanny and Alexander” luxuriates in space. In its longest version, a television mini-series that spanned more than five hours, the camera lingers on interiors that in their accumulating details say as much as the characters, who themselves say quite a lot.

Bergman made another edit of the film, of a little more than three hours, for theatrical release. But the longer “Fanny and Alexander” spends 90 minutes alone on a single Christmas Eve and morning in the lives of the loving but complicated Ekdahl family in early 20th-century Uppsala, Sweden.

Opera, too, is a slow-moving art form that luxuriates, but in different ways. Composers and singers relish sound, not sight. And so, in a new opera based on “Fanny and Alexander,” opening at La Monnaie in Brussels on Dec. 1, that Christmas scene takes half as long as it does in the TV cut. It’s one of several changes that were made for this adaptation, composed by Mikael Karlsson to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, and with a starry team that includes the director Ivo van Hove and the singers Sasha Cooke, Thomas Hampson and Anne Sofie von Otter. (The production will be streamed on multiple platforms on Dec. 13.)

Most obviously, the opera has a running time of two and a half hours, less than half that of the longer cut of the film. Still, the stage version will be recognizably “Fanny and Alexander,” Bergman’s partially autobiographical coming-of-age tale, in which fantasy lives freely alongside reality as a vast tableau of human experience is seen through the eyes of a child. Bergman, who had planned for it to be his last film, said around its release, in 1982, that it represented “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”

The film plays on television every Christmas in Sweden, and Karlsson, who is Swedish, said he felt the most pressure to get that holiday scene right. When he, Vavrek and van Hove met early in the opera’s development, van Hove suggested hurrying through Christmas to get to the wedding: the marriage of Alexander’s recently widowed mother to the local bishop, the precipitating event of the story’s darkest dramas.