But it’s not cluttered like the film version. Video projections, concert-like lighting and nightmarish characters fill the stage. “Another Brick in the Wall,” which debuted at the Opéra de Montréal last year, capitalizes on all things operatic in “The Wall” - its almost mystical depiction of the emotional impact of war, isolation and a family legacy that would make the brood from the “Ring” cycle blush. Bilodeau’s music utilizes a 51-member chorus and replaces weeping guitars with more modern, atonal chords from a 64-piece orchestra. The opera weaves the same story: A rock star, increasingly detached from the outside world, recalls his miserable postwar childhood (Gee, tell me again, why did I relate to this album as a teenager?) and takes a brutal emotional journey to a sort of redemption. Most of the original music is there, but it’s been recast, minus David Gilmour’s guitar solos that seem to come as gut punches from on high. What makes the opera so fascinating to me is that it’s not a blow-by-blow rendering of the album like Alan Parker’s reverent but hollow film. The concert hall was built in the 1870s over a paupers’ cemetery, and its legendary ghost sightings seem somehow fitting when talking about “The Wall.” You don’t get much more haunted than this album. Waters and the opera composer Julien Bilodeau, begins July 20 for five performances at the Cincinnati Opera in a particularly favorite haunted building from my childhood: the newly renovated Music Hall, an icon of the city’s reinvigorated historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. “Another Brick in the Wall,” conceived by Mr. Once again, “The Wall” has wormed its way back into my consciousness. The album has been adapted into a 1982 movie, a staged concert in 1990 near the site of the newly torn-down Berlin Wall, a full-album concert tour from 2010 to 2013 by the Pink Floyd alumnus Roger Waters, and now an opera, making its American debut this month near my hometown in Ohio. Now, incredibly, my LP is cool again as vinyl resurfaces. My LP - purchased from my meager pay as a polyester-clad Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips newbie - survived scratches and a bong spill over the next year, even deeper nicks in my college dorm room in the early ’80s, and then a lonely and extended three-decade exile on various shelves in various homes on three continents since CDs, iTunes and YouTube took over. Turns out I wasn’t alone in my glomming onto “The Wall.” Some 23 million copies have been sold in the nearly 40 years since its debut. I really did just want to be comfortably numb. The album embodied my grief so succinctly. And like the rock opera’s lead character, I had lost my father as a child. “ Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb” lodged in my teen craw after President Jimmy Carter reintroduced Selective Service the next year - just before I turned 18 - at the height of the Cold War. Suddenly, Pink Floyd’s brand of existentialism became a rallying cry for my untapped angst.
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