Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  WHEN I BEGAN WORK on the Cocteau trilogy, the first idea that governed my work was to bring out the underlying themes of the three films. They are best described as a pair of dualities—life/death and creativity being the first; and the ordinary world and the world of transformation and magic being the second. These topics are at the core of all three works and are explicitly put forward in the films. Whereas the first trilogy of operas (Einstein, Satyagraha, Akhnaten) was about the transformation of society through the power of ideas and not through the force of arms, this second trilogy from the 1990s revolves around the transformation of the individual—the moral and personal dilemmas of a person as opposed to a whole people or society. A corollary to this is the way in which magic and the arts are used to transform the ordinary world into a world of transcendence. These three films of Cocteau are meant as a discussion, description, and instruction on creativity and the creative process.

  My second purpose in making the trilogy was to effectively rethink the relationship of opera to film. The simplest statement of the idea, though not a complete one, is that instead of turning an opera into a film, I would be turning films into opera. In doing this, it would be necessary to turn around the conventions common to almost all filmmakers. The normal flow that guides the threefold process of pre-production, photography, and post-production is far from eternal truth, and the processes of filmmaking and opera writing offer powerful alternatives to conventional thinking. It is important to note that the accepted conventions have a good reason for being there. In that they are universally accepted, film production is made far easier for the large number of people who will be working together. The process does not need to be explained. It works well enough, and the film business can carry on efficiently just being what it wants to be—that is, a business. However, once that way of thinking is set aside, all kinds of other possibilities quickly appear. But this will happen well outside of the commercial framework, where the rules are set by the marketplace and the conventions of working are well-known.

  Each of my approaches to the three films was different. For Orphée, I took the film script and treated it like a libretto. The movie is not shown—simply, the scenario of the movie is used to stage an opera, with singers, sets, and lighting. The stage director doesn’t reference the film at all. The staged version is fifteen minutes longer than the film version because it takes longer to sing a text than to speak it. Since I didn’t have to worry about fitting the libretto to the picture, I could let it be any length needed. Every line from the movie is included in the libretto, every scene from the movie is in the libretto, so in a real way, the libretto for the opera was by Cocteau.

  Fittingly, almost every piece of music I wrote for Orphée comes directly out of each particular scene of the movie. For instance, in the opening scene in the café, Cocteau has someone playing a guitar, but that was much too tame for an opera. What was needed was a honky-tonk piano. I thought of it as if some piano player who plays honky-tonk music was sitting in the café and someone said, “Hey, play the piano for us!” because that’s the music you would hear if you were sitting in a café. The music provided for going to the Underworld has a bit of a funereal sound, but it’s also almost boogie-woogie music. For the two romantic duets for Orphée and La Morte (Death), one in Act 1 and one in Act 2, I was thinking of Puccini and Verdi, composers who wrote operatic love music. I thought, If I were a real opera composer, and I was about to write a romantic duet, what would it be? I wanted to write a modern love duet, and that was my version of it. I think the reason this opera is so popular is that the music composed for it was directly inspired by the film, and not by the myth.

  Edouard Dermithe, who as a young man played both the role of Cégeste in Orphée (1949) and Paul, the male lead in Les Enfants Terribles (1950), was an elderly gentleman when I met him in the early 1990s. At that point, he was representing the Cocteau estate, and it was he who made the financial and legal arrangements for the rights that I would need to make the adaptations I had in mind. Though I took great pains to let him know, both in French and English, what I was intending to do, I’m not sure he really understood what the outcome would be. He was mainly concerned that the actual words were kept intact, which is what I did in both Orphée and La Belle et la Bête.

  Since my work would be in French, no translation was needed. Finally, after a long three-hour lunch, we had an understanding, opened yet another bottle of wine, and toasted to the success of the new adaptations.

  A few months later he sent me a typescript of the scenario of La Belle et la Bête.

  “Please underline all the things that you cut,” he wrote on the cover.

  I made a copy of the scenario with not even the slightest changes or marks and returned it to him the next day.

  “It’s not necessary,” I wrote back. “Nothing from the movie was cut. No changes were made.”

  I didn’t hear from him again for about a year. Early in 1994, he wrote me that he would be attending a performance of La Belle et la Bête during one of our European dates, but his car broke down en route and he never got there. As far as I know, he never did see any of the productions. Nor did I hear from him again.

  AS A TRADITIONAL FAIRY TALE, La Belle et La Bête, the second opera of the trilogy, was an ideal vehicle for Cocteau’s symbolic-allegorical film. In Cocteau’s telling, La Bête is a prince who has been bewitched and transformed into a fearsome creature who can only be returned to his human form through the power of love. The young and beautiful Belle comes to live in La Bête’s chateau in order to save her father, who had stolen a rose from La Bête’s garden, from death. The first time Belle sees La Bête, she faints out of fear, but over time she becomes fond of him, though she still refuses his proposals of marriage. The plot progresses through a series of events involving the rose, a golden key, a magic mirror, a magic glove, and a horse named Magnifique. In the end, Belle is allowed to leave La Bête’s chateau to save her ill father, but she returns when she sees through the magic mirror that La Bête is dying of grief over losing her. When, through death, La Bête is transformed back into a prince, she flies away with him to his kingdom to become his queen.

  My treatment of La Belle et la Bête was the most radical of the three works. I began by projecting the film as the visual aspect of the opera but turning off the soundtrack—music and speech—completely. I replaced the speech with singing parts, with all the other music also replaced. Technically this was not that hard to do, but it took a little time. I used the scenario from the film, timing every syllable, scene by scene. In using this method, the singers would only have the same amount of time to sing as the actor on the screen has to speak. Then I set up the music paper with bar-lines and metronome markings, also scene by scene.

  After that, it was like hanging clothes on a clothesline. I began with the instrumental accompaniment, which was scored for my own ensemble. Now I knew where the vocal line needed to be and also, referring to the instrumental accompaniment, what the actual notes could be. After that was completed, we made a “demo” tape of the music in my studio and played it against the actual screen image. It seems my time working on doublage in Paris in the 1960s, almost thirty years before, had been more useful than I had ever anticipated. I knew from those years that the synchronization of image and sound did not have to be 100 percent throughout. In fact, all that was needed was a good moment of synchronization every twenty to thirty seconds. After that, the spectator’s own mind would arrange everything else. This gave a lot of flexibility in placing the sound on the lips. I also knew that words beginning with labial consonants such as m, v, or b in English and associated with the lips being closed were the best for those “synch” moments. Using these technical aids and the computer to adjust the sound to the image, Michael Riesman and I were able to fine-tune the vocal lines as needed. This was especially helpful because this score would be performed live with the film, and Michael would be the conductor.

  At this point, in the mid-1990s, M
ichael had conducted Godfrey’s Qatsi films many times over the past ten years. It had quickly become clear that the live performances were more interesting and powerful when the synchronization of music to film was achieved visually—without the mechanical aid of a metronome or “click track” to guide the music. When the conductor visually matched the flow of music to the film, the effect was identical to a live performance (with the usual ebb and flow of the tempo) because it was a live performance. Over the years Michael had become so skillful with Godfrey’s films that I often noticed that these synchronized live performances were better than the pre-recorded version that one might see in a movie theater or at home on a DVD. From our point of view, the live performance raised the bar in terms of our expectations.

  La Belle et la Bête was set up with the ensemble sitting in front and below the screen facing Michael, who was standing facing the screen with his back to the public. The singers stood behind the ensemble, their heads just below the screen, also facing Michael. They were in concert dress, not looking at all like the actors in the film. They were lit from in front, but not so bright as to “white out” the screen image. At the beginning, the singers read the music from music stands, but after a few dozen performances, they hardly looked at the music.

  This presentation had some surprising and unexpected results. We soon discovered that the audiences, for almost the first eight minutes, simply didn’t understand what was happening. They could see the film and the singers, but it took that long for them to understand that the voices of the singers had become the voices of the actors on the screen. There was a learning curve taking place and it happened without fail at every performance. Then, at almost exactly eight minutes into the film, the entire audience actually “saw it.” There could often be a collective audible intake of breath when that happened. From that instant on, the live singers and the filmed actors had merged into a double personae and stayed that way right through to the end of the singing and the last image of the film.

  Before that last image, there is even a more intense moment when La Bête appears to be dying. At that moment, the audience is watching both Jean Marais, the onscreen Bête, and Greg Purnhagen, our singer, singing his words. I’ve watched that a hundred times and, at that moment, it is as if the two performances had perfectly merged. I have to admit I had no idea that this would happen, and it never fails to surprise me. But there it is—a merging of live and pre-recorded performances, both unexpected and powerful.

  With Orphée, the music comes out of the scenes of the film, but for La Belle et La Bête I wanted to use some of the techniques found in traditional operas whereby a musical theme is linked to a person: when a character appears, their music is heard. This is the traditional operatic system of leitmotifs. There was a theme for Belle and a theme for La Bête. There was a theme for when they are together and another for when they’re traveling toward each other. As the opera progresses, those themes return. That was the chosen musical strategy of the film.

  The leitmotif for La Bête starts low in the orchestra, and as it rises, turns into a melody. The theme associated with Belle occurs for the first time when she enters the chateau and walks through the hallway of candle-holding arms that have emerged from the walls. It is delicate music, but it’s constantly being interrupted by growls and other sounds being made by La Bête. Her music is also heard when La Bête enters her room to watch her sleeping. As the opera proceeds and La Belle begins to return his love, her music becomes intertwined with the music of La Bête. It is his music that becomes the love music of the opera.

  In the scene when Belle begs La Bête for permission to visit her father, La Bête, moved by her plea, decides to let her go, but requires her, at the cost of his own life, to return in a week. He explains to her that his magic exists by the force of five power objects—the rose, the key, the mirror, the glove, and the horse. These five are the root of La Bête’s creativity and magic.

  The point is, if a young artist were to ask Cocteau directly what he would need to pursue the life and work of an artist, these five elements would be the answer. The rose represents beauty. The key represents technique—literally, the means by which the “door” to creativity is opened. The horse represents strength and stamina. The mirror represents the path itself, without which the dream of the artist cannot be accomplished. The meaning of the glove eluded me for a long time, but finally, and unexpectedly, I understood that the glove represents nobility. By this symbol Cocteau asserts that the true nobility of mankind are the artist-magician creators. This scene, which leads directly to the resolution of the fairy tale, is framed as the most significant moment of the film and is the message we are meant to take away with us: Cocteau is teaching about creativity in terms of the power of the artist, which we now understand to be the power of transformation.

  FOR COCTEAU, PLACE HAS A SPECIAL SIGNIFICANCE related specifically to creativity. In the three operas, the place or site of creativity is a central idea. The site of creativity for La Belle et la Bête is the chateau. In Orphée, the site of creativity is the garage where Orphée’s car is parked and where he hears the communications from the other world. In the third part of the trilogy, Les Enfants Terribles—adapted for the screen by Cocteau from his 1929 novel of the same name but directed by Jean-Pierre Melville—the site of creativity is “the Room,” where almost everything in the film plays out.

  For this third opera, which premiered in 1996, I chose a different approach to the resetting of the film. If Orphée was a romantic comedy and La Belle an allegorical romance, there is no doubt that Les Enfants is a grand tragedy, ending with the death of Paul and Elisabeth, the brother and sister who are the two principals. The film follows the lives of Paul and Elisabeth from when Paul is recovering from an injury and Elisabeth is nursing him back to health in their shared bedroom. It is here in the Room that they invent “the Game,” in which the winner is the one who has the last word, leaving the other frustrated and angry. After their invalid mother dies and they have become young adults, they move together into a mansion left to Elisabeth by her deceased husband, where they reconstruct the Room. The Game is now played much more seriously, involving two other young people, Agathe and Gerard. The love, jealousy, and deceit that develop between these two star-crossed couples lead at the end of the movie to the deaths of Elisabeth and Paul.

  In my rethinking of this film as an opera, I sought to introduce dance into the mix. Dance was the only modality of theater that had not yet been addressed in the trilogy and was the one with which I had had the most direct working experience. I asked Susan Marshall, the American choreographer and dancer, to be both director and choreographer, and to bring her dance company into the production. Besides that I would need four singers for the two couples. The original score for the film was the Concerto for Four Harpsichords by Bach, and I decided to continue the main musical texture with a multikeyboard work by using three pianos as my music ensemble.

  Susan and I spent months of preparation mapping out how the vocal quartet and her company of eight young men and women would, in music and dance, translate the film into a live performance work. In this way, at least we had a preliminary plan for the division of the work into scenes and an overall idea for the staging.

  In Les Enfants the Room itself is where almost everything plays out. It is here that the Game is played which, transparently enough, becomes “the world as art”—here actually replacing the ordinary world completely. The voice-over in the film (which is the voice of Cocteau himself) makes it absolutely clear that we are to understand Elisabeth and Paul not as just twins, but really two sides of the same person. The total immersion in the Game has now led to something not unexpected but almost familiar: the obsession of the artist in this narrow context, shared, as it were, only between themselves, as a heightened form of narcissism.

  Cocteau assures us that the ones who seek transformation put themselves at great risk when their energy is applied to themselves. In Les Enfants Terribles, though
the artist must, and will, risk everything in the game of inner and outer transformation, this interaction with the ordinary world can be dangerous and decisive. The ultimate subject of Cocteau’s work is creativity. He was greatly concerned about being the one who transcends the ordinary world, about being immortal in his work. The bargain he struck was to give up the bourgeois life in order to live the life of an artist.

  These alternative realities—the ordinary world and the world that the artist either is creating or creating from—result in the artist’s having his feet in two different worlds at the same time. In the case of poets, they are obliged to use the language of the quotidian world, the daily world. This is one of the curious things about poetry: the currency of poetry is the currency of everyday language. They are truly the alchemists who are turning lead into gold—and that is, above all, what makes poetry such a high art form.

  Painters, dancers, musicians, composers, and sculptors, on the other hand, live in two worlds. In my case, one is the ordinary world and one is the world of music, and I’m actually in both at the same time. There are special languages we use in that other world—the language of music; the language of movement; the language of image—and they can exist independently. We live in these different worlds, though at times we may not even see the connections.