Monsters
of Grace: A Digital Opera in Three Dimensions
by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson
PICA at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway,
242-1419 7
9:30 pm Wednesday, April 7
$31.50, $26.50 PICA members
An enormous snake, so large it seems less like a reptilian
body than a slow but powerful river of scales, winds through
one scene of Monsters of Grace, the latest collaboration
by Philip
Glass and Robert
Wilson. The projected image shares the stage with a collection
of outsized crockery and a few human figures--not living actors
but digitized animated forms. The ensemble in the orchestra
pit combines voices with the sampled sounds of instruments
including sitar, psaltery, finger cymbals and gomé
(an African drum). Welcome to the new world of opera.
Monsters of Grace is the third operatic production
to appear in Portland and Salem in the past month, and that
alone should tell you something about the state of the art.
This isn't the kind of place, like New York or London, where
opera is a permanent feature of the cultural landscape,
so how do you account for what seems to be a surge in its
popularity? And how do you reconcile this interest in opera
with persistent forecasts about the demise of classical
music in general? Ensembles, promoters and record labels
have had to make rapid changes of direction to keep existing
audiences and win new, mostly younger, ones. Setting a new
course for an orchestra is difficult enough; compared to
symphonic art, opera is labor-intensive, expensive and about
as maneuverable as the New Carissa. Shouldn't it
be dead by now?
But opera's not dead, not by a long shot. Older operas
continue to be presented, often in modernized forms, and
new ones appear with regularity. While Portland Opera's
most recent performances of Gounod's Faust and Handel's
Julius Caesar, for example, have failed to make the
case for their modern touches, others have been more successful.
Young Turks like Peter Sellars--who has set Don Giovanni
in the South Bronx and Cosî fan Tutte in a
diner on the Jersey Shore--and various directors at English
National Opera have updated classic works in ways that have
been well received both critically and at the box office.
Composers such as John Adams write works of contemporary
verismo (The Death of Klinghoffer, for example),
based on current news. And there are still audiences for
pieces by unreconstructed modernists such as John Peel,
whose Voces Virgilianae premiered at the inauguration
of Willamette University's new music facility last month.
Whatever the vitality of opera in its traditional forms,
many see the future of the genre in Monsters of Grace.
Composer Philip Glass spoke about it with WW last
week.
WW: Film is a crucial element of Monsters
of Grace. Did you ever entertain the idea of presenting
it just as a film, in theaters?
Philip Glass: The producer has talked about other possibilities--IMAX,
DVD, all this other stuff--and they're all possible. There's
nothing that's firmly been decided. But it was intended
to be a performance piece. The singers stand below the film,
but they're lit, so you see them. There's a very active
performance environment going on right in front of you,
and that was always to be a part of it.
Is this the next stage of opera?
It's certainly one of the stages of opera. I think there's
going to be a number of them. Opera has always been the
great synthesizer of the arts. It was a great intermediate
performance arena for centuries: It's where text and movement
and music came together. For some reason the two new art
forms of the 20th century, which would be jazz and film,
resisted opera for a while. With Gershwin you get the first
jazz operas, and there have been a lot of jazz operas since
then, but it took quite a while for that to come about.
And now the idea of film being part of opera--it only happened
in the last eight or 10 years. So it took around 100 years
to get around to that, which is kind of surprising considering
the kind of appetite that, as a medium, opera has for inclusion.
There are other areas, too, that will have to do with interactive
activity, with the Internet, with all the kinds of technology
that people are experimenting with.... There's no doubt
that that's going to happen. Once the intention is in place,
it's not long before it happens.
Do you feel that you're still working in the same idiom
as opera composers of the past?
There are commonalities. The biggest one, of course, is
very fundamental. It's the combination of subject matter
with music, where the source of the music comes from something
outside music itself--in this case, a story or narrative
or, sometimes in modern works, a depiction of ideas. The
big difference with traditional concert music is that opera
has to do with subject matter. When I began working in traditional
opera, my subject matter was sometimes philosophical-political,
like Gandhi. And I used the theater as a way of presenting
ideas of social change that were appealing to me and which
I thought needed to be restated. In that way I'm certainly--if
I may make the comparison--like the 19th-century opera composers
like Verdi, or Beethoven; these were real men and women
working in the theater who were looking at opera in that
way, and I was, too. So I think that continues to be true
today.
How has your operatic compositional technique changed
over the years?
I began with a thoroughly abstract piece, Einstein
on the Beach, where the voice was used as an instrument
and the words were hardly comprehensible. You could understand
them, but you didn't know what they meant. [Laughs.] The
big change with this piece is that the central event of
the piece is the voice as a vocal instrument. It's not used
for its instrumental qualities but for its vocal qualities.
And secondly, the text now has connotative meaning. It tells
a story, it describes thing that you're meant to understand.
This has happened in the last 25 years; it didn't happen
overnight, it happened over a process of writing 15 operas.
There's been a steady change--whether there's been a development,
I don't know--which has to do with how I think about the
relationship between the elements of text and image, music
and movement. I've come more and more to see them as equal
partners and to see my collaborators as co-authors, rather
than to see the opera as the work of one person. That's
just a little bit of how it has changed for me, and it continues
to change.
Are there other changes in your music that have been
brought to bear on this piece?
Since the mid-'70s I've been--along with many, many other
people--reworking the basis of tonal music in terms of late
20th-century practice, and that's part of this work, too.
I've also continued to include techniques I've learned from
non-western musical cultures, especially in the rhythmic
structure of music. The new things are, in fact, the kinds
of technology that are available. It allows me to make sounds
I wouldn't otherwise be able to make. My associations in
the last 10 years enter into it, too. I've written songs
for Suzanne Vega, Paul Simon, Keith Jarrett and Natalie
Merchant. I've worked with Michael Stipe. Those things end
up being part of my musical constitution in a way, and it
all comes to the table when I sit down to work.
What does the state of opera today look like to you?
I'm certainly not alone in this business any more. When
I began I was the only person I knew writing an opera, and
now I don't know anyone not writing an opera. Opera
has been rediscovered.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published March 31,
1999
|
