Or: the familiar becomes utterly alien here. Or: embracing meaninglessness as the first principle. One hundred years after his birth, John Cage takes centre stage in HF weekend.
Ever since Reinbert de Leeuw played it in the fastest talk show on Dutch television, John Cage's 4'33" has been a well-known composition in our country. For exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds, the musician does not play a single note and the audience hears nothing but the ambient sounds.
Why 4'33" and not 5'12" or 1'18"? Simple: the very first performance simply took that much time, and since then that has been the length prescribed by Cage. What you hear during a performance may be coincidental, but the performance is otherwise strictly fixed.
In extreme form, this is exactly what happens in Europera 3+4. Again, chance plays a big role, but with as many as 3256 and 275 directions for 70- and 30-minute operas.
Well, operas.
At Europera 3 we hear six soloists sing self-selected arias, while six 'players' of record players make a random selection from thousands of 78-rpm records, two pianists play snippets of Liszt's opera excerpts, drowned out at random moments by the Truckera tape - a collage of hundreds of opera excerpts that is literally deafening.
The result is not an opera, not even a collage opera, but virtually the entire history of European opera. Simultaneously. Interchangeably. Without story, without development, without meaning. As if, as musicologist James Pritchett described it, Martians give their vision of opera.
Total chaos, then, because unlike 4'33", there is no near silence here, but a motley cacophony, a total sensory overload, especially for those who are not Martians, but have a head full of opera fragments themselves. And that is the point.
At The spin of loneliness Paul Auster - in whose work coincidence also plays a major role - refers to a passage from War and Peace in which Tolstoy reduces opera to absurdity by simply describing what he sees:
In the second act, there were monuments made of cardboard on stage, and a round hole in the backcloth was supposed to represent the moon. The footlights were covered and low notes were being played by the horns and double bass, when a number of men came up from both sides of the stage, wearing black cloaks and brandishing things that looked like daggers. Then other men ran onto the stage and started dragging away the girl who was dressed first in white and now in light blue. They did not take her away immediately, but spent a long time singing with her, until finally they dragged her away anyway, and in the wings something metallic was struck three times and everyone knelt and sang a prayer. All these acts were repeatedly interrupted by the enthusiastic cries of the audience.
Ah, ok, opera is absurd and John Cage just wants to show that. We get it. But why in this form?
Fortunately, Paul Auster helps. After the passage dedicated to Tolstoy, he continues:
Like everyone else, he yearns for meaning. Like everyone else, his life is so fragmented that every time he sees a connection between two fragments, he is tempted to search for a meaning in them. The connection exists. But giving it meaning, looking behind the bare fact of his existence, would build an imaginary world in the real world, and he knows it would not hold.
Exactly this happens. Cage entices every listener, whether they like it or not, to recognise the various fragments and tie them together, to give them meaning. Guess the record, but in extreme form. Not entirely coincidentally, remarkably many conversations in the interval were also about this.
But that's nonsense. Building castles in the air. Nor should you want it at all, recognising those fragments. The familiar becomes utterly alien here. Because the fact that I recognised the Parsifal fragments after a single keystroke has little to do with this performance of Europera, but everything to do with coincidental fact that Wagner's opera is on my agenda on Tuesday. Even that in this version of Europera 4 after intermission it seems as if the genre is being carried to its grave, complete with mourning wreath, is a forced search for meaning.
In his bravest moments, he embraces futility as the first principle, Auster concludes in almost Buddha-like fashion. Cage also had something to do with that. Like Wagner in Parsifal, albeit via Schopenhauer. About that, Jonathan Harvey wrote another opera, Wagner dream, which had its world premiere in Amsterdam, at the Holland Festival.
But there I go again, like a runaway Victrola, just looking for connections everywhere.
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