Warning: Opera Collision Ahead : John Cage didn’t really like opera, but his ‘Europeras 3 & 4’ prove that he liked lots of opera all at the same time

Shortly before the first performance of his “Europeras 3 & 4” in London in 1990, John Cage described them in a radio interview on the BBC.

“Europera 3,” which is 70 minutes long, he explained, includes 12 78-rpm record players operated by six performers. “They don’t play simultaneously, do they?” the bewildered interviewer asked.

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes,” Cage replied. “You have what you might call a cloud of recorded opera. We have live opera, too. We have six singers. Not all six are singing at the same time, but sometimes five sing at once.

“And there are two pianists playing excerpts from Liszt’s operatic fantasies which are such elaborate keyboard works, but the excerpts are not longer than 16 measures.”

The interviewer, seemingly unable to endure more, interrupted: “Have you got something against opera?”

It’s not the first time that question has been asked since Cage entered the operatic arena in 1988 with his startling, large-scale “Europeras 1 & 2,” written for the Frankfurt Opera. Nor is it as naive a question as the BBC interviewer makes it sound.

Cage’s response to questions about “Europeras 3 & 4” is typically non-judgmental. The works will be given their first American performances by Long Beach Opera Saturday night at Long Beach’s Center Theater in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition “Rolywholyover A Circus,” and repeated next Sunday afternoon.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t like opera, but I had very little experience of it,” he answered patiently. Of the operas he had heard, he pointed specifically to Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande” and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

“They were marvelous,” he said. “But I did have the feeling that I, as a person, didn’t love opera. I didn’t go out of my way to hear it.”

It is actually much more complicated and interesting than that. The collision of Cage--a composer who always pushed the limits of our appreciation of music and a tireless provocateur of all that could become institutionalized in art making--and of opera, the most institutionalized of all the performing arts, proved practically an operatic confrontation in itself. In his effort to deconstruct Western opera, an opera house mysteriously burned down. But out of the ashes arose the phoenix of an entirely fresh way of performing, putting on, watching, listening to opera and of experiencing its traditions.

Cage, it is true, had little to do with opera for most of his career. Growing up in Southern California (he was born in Los Angeles in 1912), Cage had little exposure to opera when he was young, and never developed a taste for it. But Cage was also highly cosmopolitan. Dropping out of Pomona College after two years, Cage spent time in Europe and New York. Back in Los Angeles he studied with Arnold Schoenberg, himself a great opera composer. He lived briefly in San Francisco and Chicago, where there was operatic tradition, and at age 30 settled in New York where he remained until his death last year.

What really kept Cage and opera apart were reasons more personal and more profound. One was the nature of opera itself, and what it represented in the 1930s and 1940s, when Cage was developing his own musical character. Opera did not take root in American soil readily. At that time, most opera being written was not only European but also desperately and decadently trying to hold onto what seemed a dying Western musical tradition.

Cage, on the other hand, was a young man bursting the boundaries of the musically possible. He wanted a music not heard before; he wanted to find ways to bring new sounds, and new silences, into music, and concentrated mostly on percussion music. He wanted to find illuminating modern ways to structure music and, thus, developed rhythmic structures.

Cage was also an eminently practical composer who never wrote a piece that wasn’t intended for a specific performance. Not only was Cage little interested in opera, the world of opera, that most expensive and extensive of all the performing arts, was uninterested in him, as well. Nor would it have been practical for Cage, in these heady times when he was making new musical discoveries almost by the week, to spend the time on a single composition that opera demands.

Cage briefly had considered the writing of an opera in the late 1940s. At that time his own emotional life was in upheaval, as his marriage to Xenia Kashevaroff was coming apart, and Cage, for one of the few times in his life tried to express his emotions in his music. At the suggestion of his friend, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, Cage began work on a mythological opera about Persius and Andromeda for which Campbell would write the libretto. But Cage was never comfortable with it, and the piece did not get past the early sketch stage. He also, around that time, considered an opera on Mila Ropa, the Tibetan saint. He learned of the legend from a library book, but then, he once said, he had to return the book.

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While never a dramatic composer, Cage was always a theatrical one. Even when he chose chance operations in his composing as a way of letting in the complexities of nature, and removing his own ego from the process at the same time, he never lost his sense of the stage. He collaborated throughout his career with the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, writing a vast amount of music for the dance. At Black Mountain College, he instigated what came to be known in the art world as the Happening.

His most famous piece, the silent work, “4’33,” “ proved to be pure theater, with the audience having its attention focused on ambient sounds thanks to the presence of a musician who appears on stage but plays nothing. Later Cage used his own highly charismatic theatrical presence as the subject of his music, music made from the telling of stories.

When the Frankfurt Opera eventually commissioned Cage to write an opera, it seems that finally composer and opera were ready for each other. In his 70s, though still captivated by the new, Cage had also come to terms with the past. Meanwhile, opera had been invaded by the avant-garde, and the more progressive European houses, at least, were ready for just about anything.

They weren’t, however, ready for Cage, who proposed an opera of operas that forced singers, orchestra musicians, technicians and everyone else involved with an opera production to rethink their jobs. But what proved radical and disturbing about “Europeras 1 & 2” was not that they were asked to do something different from what they normally do, it was that they were asked to do exactly what they always do, only in a new and disorienting context.

Singers sing arias they know and wear familiar costumes; dancers move in ways they were trained to move; lighting people follow the same kinds of lighting cues they normally do; musicians play standard repertoire opera parts. But none of these things are any longer related. Chance elements determine what arias should be sung when, what costumes should be worn (so the character and dress never go together), entrances and placements of singers and dancers, lighting, the large flats that are the scenery, and even the plot synopses (not everyone in the audience gets the same plot synopsis).

The result was that everyone involved in this almost oppressively collaborative art form, from the singers to the stage hands to the audience members, suddenly and shockingly are treated as individuals.

“Now with respect to European opera I’m making a circus,” Cage said. “A circus is not a single thing, but a plurality of things. So that there are many things, each one at its own center. In fact the kind of theater that these operas propose is a circus theater in which each thing that happens is at its own center. The lighting doesn’t light the action, the lighting is itself lighting. And the actions can take place in the dark or in the light. Everyone involved is forced to find his or her own focus. Everyone and everything is its own center of attention.”

In the end it was this overthrowing of operatic government, the challenge to the political and social structure of operatic production that, according to Heinz-Klaus Metzger, the dramaturge of the company at the time, made for the most protests. Most of the singers, in fact, adapted well, and some even found the very great concentration necessary for singing familiar arias in unfamiliar scenic and musical environments revealed to them some sloppy habits that had crept into their singing.

But Metzger says there was also tremendous resistance to the work from the company, particularly from the stage crew. The word impossible seems to have become the common response to all that was asked for, and one of Cage’s most cogent sustained performances seems to have been his indefatigable backstage persuasiveness--three months’ worth of battles in rehearsal that must be fought in order to get the opera staged at all. Metzger says that there were many, many times he was convinced it never would be produced.

Then, two days before the premiere, Cage and Cunningham, who were staying in the opera house, were awakened by the smell of smoke. The building had been set on fire by an arsonist and was destroyed. Eventually, a vagrant was accused of the crime and found guilty. But neither Cage nor Metzger were convinced; both believed it to be sabotage. Metzger says he has no evidence for his conspiracy theories, but he finds nothing believable in the case that reached the courts.

Several weeks later “Europeras 1 & 2” were successfully produced in a Frankfurt playhouse; later the production traveled to New York and was given by the Zurich Opera. But both the trauma and the revelation of “Europeras 1 & 2” influenced their sequels, “Europeras 3 & 4.” Cage avoided the pitfalls of operatic politics by making these chamber and concert works for singers, pianists and Victrolas. The staging is greatly simplified, and the chance-determined lighting is far more prominent.

Composer and Cage assistant Andrew Culver, who is directing “Europeras 3 & 4” for Long Beach, describes the works as moving back in time. “Europera 3,” he says, “first hits you as cacophony and rich, rich textures.” The grander of the two, Cage called “Europera 3” Wagnerian. It has bright lights, with rapid lighting cues and looks up-to-date, although the scratchy 78s give it also a sense of timelessness. It uses 75 lights, 2,999 cues, as well as blinding brief flashes; six singers each singing six arias (Gluck to Puccini) of his or her own choice; 1-16 measure excerpts from Liszt’s opera fantasies; two pianists; fragments of 300 78s played on 12 electric Victrolas by six composers; brief intrusions of a composite tape, “Truckera,” of more than a hundred operas superimposed.

“Europera 4” is 30 minutes long and more subdued. Cage referred to it as Mozartean in contrast with “Europera 3.” Here there are only 32 lights, 300 cues; two singers in the performance space and at a distance; complete Liszt fantasies played by a single piano; a single Victrola of the older, wind-up variety; the performance of “Truckera” in another part of the building; no lights on the stage, with lights on the walls and ceiling.

“When you go from ‘Europera 3’ to ‘Europera 4,’ it does feel like going back in time,” Culver notes. “There is the older acoustic Victrola with the horn, and darkness, as though you are looking deeper and deeper into the past.”

The director’s role here, like everything else in Cage-ian opera, is changed. “I don’t get into any interpretive stuff with the singers,” Culver says. “I don’t even have the scores, and I don’t show any real interest in them. I consider the singing their responsibility. The only thing I do is to let the singers know it’s not a joke and that we’re listening to them as closely as we would be at a recital. The general idea is that it’s a straight performance.

“The only other thing I do is, well, some of them walk funny. We had a guy once who sort of stomped his feet and marched into a position, because he was doing some kind of macho Italian soldier song. He thought the stamping of his feet and the marching was appropriate, and when he finished he literally marched off the stage and squared off a corner, doing one of those soldier’s turns. So I had to tone that down.”

Culver’s job, rather, is to function as traffic cop, which is usually a pejorative term for an opera director. (He programmed all the computerized chance operations for Cage in these works as well as in “Rolywholyover A Circus,” the Cage show currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art that is created around many of the same principles.) But an element often found in Cage’s art is the elevation of the ordinary into art.

In “Europeras 3 & 4,” for instance, the scratchiness of 78-rpm recordings, so annoying when heard on a single disc, appear transformed, making the voices seem very romantic. Familiar arias are new in their new contexts. The tackiness of shooting of bright flash into someone’s eye becomes, as Culver observes, an illuminating moment of wiping the visual slate clean, blinding you for a brief second so that you can see newly again. And the director’s role here elevates the traffic cop into something more like a general coordinating and synchronizing highly complex maneuvers.

Cage did, indeed, have something against opera. He hated the familiarity and sloppiness that can so easily slip into any art and especially an art like opera with its enormous rehearsal demands--he hated the government of opera and its institutions. His “Europeras” he meant to be “your operas,” that is, our operas. He was, he hoped, liberating them from slovenly tradition, and making them new again.