Wagner Meets Cocteau

By Michael Walsh

Richard Wagner envisioned something he called a Gesamtkunstwerk -- an all- encompassing work of art -- that would meld music, poetry, drama, dance and stagecraft into one unified, glorious spectacle. The Minimalist composer Philip Glass, 57, has been inviting comparison with Wagner ever since the 1976 debut of his four-hour epic Einstein on the Beach, Wagnerian in length and scope if not in idiom; and the Wagnerian ideal has been evident in much of his later work as well -- in Hydrogen Jukebox's marriage of Minimalism to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg (1990), and in 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof (1988), which combined David Henry Hwang's text and Jerome Sirlin's images.

Now, it turns out, Glass's most fully realized Gesamtkunstwerk has its origins in the movies. For his new opera, La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast), which had its American premiere last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Glass has finally found the perfect vehicle for his Wagnerism in the film of the same title by the French author, aesthete and cineaste Jean Cocteau. Glass's is the best version of the story yet -- even surpassing Disney's animated movie musical.

La Belle, which has already had 40 performances in Europe and will tour 35 U.S. cities next year, is not Glass's first foray into film. He has composed memorable music for Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi and contributed an eerie, if more conventional, score for the 1992 Hollywood horror picture Candyman.

The films of Cocteau, the boulevardier who knew everyone and did everything in the period between the World Wars, are serving to inspire a trilogy by Glass. His work in progress, Les Enfants Terribles, will be a dance-theater work based on the scenario of the film. In last year's Orphee, the first in the series, Glass used the screenplay of Cocteau's 1949 film as the libretto for a conventional opera, with entirely new music, sets and staging.

La Belle et la Bete, however, goes one audacious step further. The whole 1946 film, starring Jean Marais and Josette Day, is projected on a screen, with English subtitles but without its sound track. Flanked by a seven-piece band of winds and synthesizers (one played by Glass himself), Alexandra Montano (la Belle), Hallie Neill, Gregory Purnhagen (la Bete) and Zheng Zhou stand beneath the screen singing Glass's operatic setting of the script. Glass not only had to get the rights to the film, he also had to pay not to use composer Georges Auric's score; and while he secured his permissions, his act of lese-majeste has apparently upset the French, who are sensitive about their cultural icons. The Philip Glass Ensemble has not been invited to perform La Belle in France, and, what's more, not a single French critic has reviewed it elsewhere.

Allons, enfants: this is Glass's best work in years, an exhilarating and original E-ticket ride that is a lot more stimulating than anything to be found at Euro Disney. The prolific composer, who has modified but never forsaken his adherence to the repetitive rhythms and simple harmonies of the Minimalist movement he helped found 30 years ago, continues to work at a furious pace, sometimes turning out one new opera a year, and he runs the risk of repeating himself. La Belle, though, is remarkable not only in conception but also in execution, brimming with freshets of melody and surging with Wagnerian power in conjuring up a magic kingdom.

As Cocteau tells it, the story combines elements of two familiar fairy tales. Like Cinderella, la Belle dotes on her ineffectual father and is cordially loathed by her two homely sisters, Felicie and Adelaide. When Dad is captured by a ferocious monster, Belle offers herself up in his place and eventually turns the Beast back into a handsome prince through the power of love.

"In order to make the opera work, we had to silence the film," says Glass. Indeed, what the composer's creation most resembles is an old-fashioned silent movie shown with live symphonic music. Silent films were never really silent; an organ or piano was always playing along, so the audience experienced an alchemy of music and image. With his new scores for such classics as The Big Parade and The Wind, composer Carl Davis has demonstrated that silents can be operas without words. Glass has simply made the next logical advance.

With the movie, the subtitles, the singing and the music -- expertly conducted by Michael Riesman -- there is a lot of information for the listener to absorb all at once, but after a few minutes everything comes together seamlessly. The restless, relentless energy of the score -- tempered, for the first time in Glass's career, by some fetching love music -- pulls one into the film in a way that mere background music never could. By the final shot, of a sublime Beauty and her transformed Beast borne magically aloft and soaring through the clouds, the audience is as enchanted as the characters. Even Wagner, who knew something about magic himself, might have been impressed.