'“You just say ‘Disney’ and you see mosquitoes all over
yourself,” says composer Phillip Glass, swatting away imaginary skeeters. We
are sat at the dining table in the living rom of a redbrick townhouse in the
East Village; through the windows can be heard the distant hum of mid-afternoon
Manhattan. Glass is telling me about his new opera, The Perfect America, which focuses on the last weeks in the life of
Walt Disney. “This is not the Uncle Walt
of your childhood,” said Time magazine when the opera premiered at Madrid's
Teatro Real in January. Conservatives were aghast. Ruben Amon, critic of Spanish right-wing daily El Mundo, said Disney
was shown as "arrogant,
misogynist, racist, tyrannical, mean, ultraconservative, uncultured,
hypochondriac and megalomaniac". Back in America, Glenn Beck caught wind of the production’s
perceived assault on an American hero, wailing “We have
nobody left!”
Contemplating
the brouhaha, Glass
affects a seignuerial impatience. “When people heard I was doing Walt Disney
for some reason they assumed I was antagonistic. I wouldn’t waste my time making fun of
somebody. It’s too much work to do an opera. You have to really be involved
with the subject. On the other hand I couldn't dust him off and make him all
pretty for people. This isn’t a movie. This isn't a documentary. Opera is a
species of poetry.”
Adapted from Peter Jungt’s 2004 novel, which took a
magnifying glass to Disney’s flaws — his treatment of his employees, his
casual racism, his testimony before HUAC — the opera opens with Walt cowering
behind the bars of his hospital bed, ceding immortality to Mickey and Donald
but fearful of what lies in wait for him.
“We had been struggling to a certain degree to find
the arrow that goes to the target, the thing that holds you to the piece,” says
Glass. “I decided that it was his actual death. It’s really about the Death of
Disney. We should have called it The Death of Disney! I would have got into
just as much trouble! Many, many
people have told me, it’s actually very touching isn’t it? Of course! It's the
death of a creator, the death of a man. Is that good enough for a controversy?
I don't know. It’s good enough for an opera!”
He laughs voluminously. With his head of brown curls, baggy,
workman jeans, and scurrying speech patterns, he seems the youngest 76-year-old
you’re likely to meet, with more than a touch of that cracked genius David
Helfgott. Speech pours off him in a cascade, a Joycean murmur that changes
direction on a dime to head down that tributary or up that alley, before
rejoining the main thread, or swimming off again — much like his music. In fact, meeting him makes you think again
about the cascading arpeggios and locomotive rhythms of his music, which puts
so many people in mind of heavy machinery at full
throttle, and point
you instead towards something more organic and vital: bubbling rivers, streams
of thought, cellular reproduction. During rehearsal of the new opera, director
Phelim McDermott happened to hear a passage of Glass’s music as a silk curtain
was being put in place, and “the music suddenly seemed to be perfect
accompaniment of the rippling silk.”
It’s telling that the effect was accidental. From what
I could gather, Glass does not work all that closely with his collaborators.
“Philip gives you lots of space,” says McDermott, most of whose interactions
with Glass were long-distance, with McDermott sending Glass photographs of his
sets for inspiration. Glass’s librettist, Rudy Wurlitzer, was
also kept at
arm’s length. “Writers can get too close,” he says, “I’ve learned from
experience it’s better that way.” He once had a dust-up with Martin Scorsese
over the score for Kundun, the two
men both introverts who use a wall of words to keep the world at bay. His most
celebrated score, for Geoffrey Reggio’s film Koyanisqatsi, was a fruitful mismatch. Reggio has intended the film
as a critique of late capitalism. Glass gave him a teeming, cogs-whirring
celebration of man and machine.
“There were people close to him who thought the score
should be more depressing, but I don't find the films depressing at all,” he
says. “They’re kind of … mmm… ecstatic.
In fact it’s this penchant for the ecstasy that brought me to realise: this
cant simply be about technology and the environment. Because why do you get
that lift from it? There’s another message there — which is the grace and
ecstasy of being alive. Is that too simple a message?”
Arguably
the same mismatch is at work in The
Perfect American, only less serendipitously. Onstage we get a series of vignettes showing
Disney acting the corporate big shot with his brother, interacting with an
animatronic Lincoln (“We’re folk heroes,/ Mr. President…You were a supporter of the Negro
Race./ That’s a major difference between us.”), bashing the Reds and the
unions, waving off Ronald Reagan on his way to political office. None other
than Andy Warhol pops up in the third act “tell Walt that we are one and the
same.” The compliment feels as off-target
as the slurs: Disney refashioned in the
image of the heroes and villains of New-York-Review-of-Books readers. Here’s the rub, though: the music is resonant,
endlessly inventive, showing “more harmonic richness than ever” according
to the New York Times which called the work Glass’s "most personally intimate,” and
suggested that the intimations of mortality shivering through the work were Glass’s
own.
Glass seems a little put out
to be eulogised so soon. “Of
course,” he says grumpily. “Of course we think about that. Artists think about
that, they worry about what’s going to happen to their paintings, what’s going
to happen to their books. Everyone thinks about that. People say you will live
in your work. I don't think people are satisfied with that. It’s no
consolation. Not really.” Looking back on a career that has included 17 operas,
going back to his groundbreaking Einstein on the Beach in 1975, 43 film scores,
including those for Kundun and Koyanisquatsi, scores of orchestral works and
chamber pieces, he says, “I was always a bit of an over-achiever. I worked
harder. There were many more talented composers at Julliard than me. It just
made me work harder. I didn't take any success as a sure thing.”
Like Disney, Glass would seem to be a supremely American,
not to say capitalist, artist. “The whole idea of High and low art nobody cares
about that any more,” he says, recalling work in his father’s record store in
downtown Manhattan, when he was 12. “One of the indelible memories I have is when people
would come up to him with a Beethoven record — this would be old 78s — and
he would give them the record and they would give him 10 dollars. I said: Ah…. Art….. Money. I saw that from the age of
12. It never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with it. To me
that was the way the world worked. The world was set up that way. When later on
I met my European colleagues and discovered that most of them had never had a
day job I was amazed — can you believe that?”
Until he made enough money from his music at age 41 for
that to be his day job, he worked variously as a taxi driver, a plumber, even a
furniture mover, once moving Time film critic Richard Schickel into a new apartment,
to Schickel’s utter dumbfoundment: Glass was by that point famous for his 1975
opera Einstein on the Beach. “I only
did jobs I could work away from,” he says, “I never worked for someone else,” an
urge towards autonomy cuts to the very heart of him. Even his music Glass never
sent to anyone else, setting up his own ensemble to perform it. “The idea of
sending out music and having it rejected to me that was unbearable. There’s a
vanity in that too. I didn't want to have to ask permission to be a musician.
Basically I decided to be the captain of the ship whether it might be a little
ship or a big ship. It was mine.”
That ship is now pretty big, its head-quarters located
a few blocks west, in the same NoHo building as Details
magazine, and including Point Music, a record label; Looking Glass, a recording
studio used by David Bowie, David Byrne, and Glass himself; Euphorbia
Productions, which stages the Philip Glass Ensemble's performances; and
Dunvagen Publishing, which licenses the rights of Glass’s music for commercials
and the like. Glass is a brand, these days. His friends rib him that he is a
“captain of industry.” Not unlike Disney
himself, I point out, who when asked for his role within the company, likened
himself to the conductor of an orchestra.
“He also said and we have
him say this in the piece, ‘I’m like the bee that goes around pollinating the
flowers.’ There’s a wonderful scene at the end where the little boy says to
him. ‘Walt, how did you do all those characters — Mickey and Donald and Snow
White. He goes, ‘Well I didn't. I’m like the bee. I took people who are
talented, I inspired them, and made all these people. Nothing would have
happened without me.”
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