Word: gesamtkunstwerk
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...