Mad Bag Opera

There are essentially three kinds of operas: those that glorify the human voice (Bellini, Donizetti), those that glorify the orchestra (Strauss, Berg) and those that glorify both (Mozart, Wagner). What would the ultimate non-or anti-opera be? Obviously, a work that glorified neither singers nor orchestra --in fact, had no singers or orchestra at all.

Last week in Germany such a work appeared. The orchestra pit of the Hamburg State Opera was empty, and up on the stage strode the weirdest bunch of non-human heavies since Wagner peopled his Ring cycle with gnomes, mermaids, dragons and bears. Five 21-ft. chrome-and-steel towers reeled in patterns that owed less to choreography than to the movement of armored tank columns. They were directed from backstage by electronic remote control, and were adorned with mirrors (20 to a tower) that caught the sunburst of spots, strobes and color projectors that beamed down upon them.

For part of the evening, stage center was occupied by a 33-ft. glass prism that drank in the light, threw it back out kaleidoscopically, and seemed to be imitating the mystery-of-the-universe monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. A troupe of ballet dancers suddenly materialized to writhe to Pierre Henry's electronic sound track, which was often so loud that the management had to provide cotton balls for the ears of the audience.

Could this be opera? Or even anti-opera? State Opera Director Rolf Liebermann clearly thought it belonged in an opera house; he commissioned the piece, called Kyldex 1, as the 23rd and final new work to open under his imprimatur at Hamburg (he now moves to the Paris Opera). So did the man who created Kyldex, Parisian Kinetic Artist Nicolas Schoeffer, 60, who spoke of his audiovisual creation as "a new step on the road toward communication and the socialization of art."

Actually Kyldex I was an exercise in mock cybernetics, complete with audience participation, that fell flat on its mirrors. The underlying premise was noble: involve the audience, especially the young. The overlying problem was that on opening night almost everything failed to work. Through a system of electronic signals attached to each seat, the audience was supposed to be able to vote on whether to halt a given segment of Kyldex I, speed it up, slow it down, have it explained or repeated. Unfortunately, the polltakers could agree only rarely on the vote. So much for artistic socialism.

When it was all over, the capacity audience of 1,600 surprised everybody, including itself, by bursting into rapturous applause. Partly this seemed to express appreciation on purely sensory grounds for the novelty of Schoeffer's pleasantly mad bag of magical tricks. Partly it was relief that the show was over. Mostly, perhaps, it was gratitude that the audience's grandest option had not been exercised--extending the basic 78 minutes of programmed sequences to the maximum of ten hours.

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