I like Lost Highway, but I don't think I ever considered it being an opera...

How to Make an Opera a Riddle: Adapt David Lynch

Ever since she was 13, when she first saw "The Elephant Man," Olga Neuwirth, a 35-year-old Austrian composer, has felt an affinity with the filmmaker David Lynch. "In his films, you are put into a vortex without actually knowing what is going on," Ms. Neuwirth said recently from Venice, where she lives. "So this has always been a part of my thinking."

The appeal of the vortex — not to mention the labyrinth, which partly explains her move from Vienna to the mazelike Venice 10 years ago — has been an essential part of Ms. Neuwirth's compositional process.

"How can you draw people in, making it impossible for them to escape from listening?" she asked. "It's so hard in our times to listen. But I never want to make music very clear. It must always be a riddle. There is never a theme you can easily latch onto. A different kind of psychology is happening, one of not knowing what is going on. That's why I'm so close to Lynch."

And that is why Ms. Neuwirth (pronounced NOY-veert) has dared to turn Mr. Lynch's most enigmatic film, "Lost Highway," into an opera. Ms. Neuwirth's "Lost Highway," which just had its premiere in Graz, her hometown (and much to her horror, Arnold Schwarzenegger's), runs through Nov. 8 at the Helmut List Hall. [NYTimes]