A new opera entitled Another Brick in the Wall: L’Opera and based on the Pink Floyd album, opened to wildly mixed reviews in Montreal last weekend. Despite reports of standing ovations – one, pre-show, simply acknowleging the attendance of Pink Floyd singer songwriter Roger waters – the critical reception swung from the Montreal Gazette’s damning judgement, “a sullen, gloomy flop given the appearance of success,” to Rolling Stone‘s conclusion that the opera is “another brick that’s here to stay.”

Based on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and staged by Opéra de Montréal, the new work tells the story of rock star Pink who alienates himself from the world, building a wall, as he copes with the pressures of stardom and his personal life. Composer Julien Bilodeau drew on elements of Pink Floyd’s music to create a largely original score.

Despite the hype and the legions of Pink Floyd fans willing to come along for the operatic ride, reviews have been largely negative. “The monotonous toggling of major and minor on the words ‘The Wall’ suggest strongly Bilodeau was working hard to flesh out a brief libretto by Waters that was big on pronouncements but thin on the specifics of the human condition,” Arthur Kaptainis’ wrote in his review for the Montreal Gazette.

He was also dismissive of the scenario – the tribulations of a troubled but incredibly wealthy rock star. “Much of this raw material generates brooding music quite lacking the forceful beat that gives rock ‘n’ roll its vitality. You know you are in trouble when a flashback of the wartime crooner Vera Lynn singing We’ll Meet Again comes across as up-tempo.” He did, however, have praise for director Dominic Champagne “who did what he could with the script he was handed” and for the “magnificent” chorus.

But his conclusion is brutal: “Alas, no surfeit of hard work, musical or theatrical, can redeem a score as bereft as this one of rhythmic life. Perhaps it is precisely the lack of a viable rock beat that resides at the heart of the failure.”

The show fared little better elsewhere. “Someone took the words of the songs, dumped the wonderful music of Roger Waters, and replaced it with a bunch of notes that have nothing to do with the original,” wrote Sophie Durocher for Le Journal de Montréal, while Sylvain Cormier wrote that Water’s lyrics “showed their limits: clichés about the decadent life of rock stars, a very thin storyline” in her review for Le Devoir.

Rolling Stone offered a more positive view, Kory Grow praising Bilodeau’s new take on the original Pink Floyd material. “Bilodeau and his collaborators accomplished what they intended,” he wrote, “they transformed rock and roll into pure opera.”