Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 39

The Portable Opera Comes of Age:
Philip Glass’s Monsters o f Grace
Philip Glass’s new 3-D digital opera, Monsters o f Grace, is a stunning
achievement in every respect, and signals the dawn of a new era in interactive
multi-media presentations, while serving as a millennial antidote to the over-stuffed.
Franco Zefferelli productions currently in vogue at Joseph Volpe’s Metropolitan
Opera House in New York City. Using a spare ensemble of perhaps a dozen musi
cians, complemented by an enormous, panoramic projection screen hanging over
head, Monsters o f Grace presents the audience with the spectacle of the first truly
“portable opera,” in which all the sets, costumes and “actors” are digitally gener
ated, and then pre-recorded on 70mm film for playback by a high-intensity 3-D
projection system. As with many of his other works. Glass’s visual designer on
Monsters o f Grace is the gifted Robert Wilson, who collaborated with Glass on the
epic Einstein on the Beach, one of the signal events in modem performance his
tory, an enormously long (4 1/2 hours) and ambitious spectacle that required the
talents of numerous musicians, performers, and a wide variety of spectacular props
for each presentation. With Monsters o f Grace, both Glass and Wilson have stripped
down their emphasis on the epic, to create a work that requires only 73 minutes to
perform, and needs only the musicians, and an unexceptionally adroit projection
staff, to present their combined vision to the public gaze.
Monsters o f Grace contains many signature characteristics of Glass and
Wilson’s past collaborations; as always, Wilson’s digital sets and simulacric per
formers move through their paces at an almost imperceptible pace, creating an
ever-changing landscape of humanist and spatial configuration that perfectly
complements Glass’s insistent, pulsating score. The unifying element of Monsters
o f Grace is in the libretto, which ties together concerns of memory, love, desire
and human frailty with a series of brief and elegiac passages, sung by the members
of Glass’s ensemble. But the scale of the completed opera would be impossible, or
impracticably expensive, to perform with human actors and full-scale props, as
had been the case with Einstein on the Beach. As Glass told writer Jeff Brown,
“When Robert [Wilson] and I conceived this piece back in 1993, we soon came to
the realization that, without artistic assistance and financial backing, we could not
stage the production conventionally. It was just too broad and ambitious. So we
shelved it until we could find a better way to conceive it live. . . that’s when we
hooked up with Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak, our 3-D computer firm, to create
our performance using stereoscopic animation. And so the Monster was bom”
(53).