A Madrigal Opera (1979)

Written in 1979 for six voices (soprano, mezzo, alto, tenor, baritone, bass) with violin and viola, the piece originally composed for the Dutch theater artist Rob Malasch. The opera is conceived as an abstract music theater work, which is designed to be “completed” by various future directors. It is for this reason that, though the work has a clear emotional shape, it has no specific theatrical content. This idea relates to the origins of renaissance and baroque madrigals that were in effect one of the first attempts to merge secular proto-dramatic text and music. In early madrigals, there is a seemingly naive relationship between the text and music; those madrigals possessed an inherent abstractness, as they were the first essays in connecting the two elements. Philip Glass’ music plays greatly on that broad possibility for connection.

Glass’ score, still bearing elements of his reductive style of that time, leaves tremendous room for directors to create a story in or around the music and the wordless singing. Part of the ingenuity of the piece is that the score leaves so much emotional room between what it is as it stands alone as a piece of music and what it could be as a piece of theater. As such, it can inspire an endless amount of versions.

Excerpted from Music by Philip Glass (1987):

“A Madrigal Opera is a vocal work for six voices, violin and viola, and it could be classified as a chamber opera with an unspecified story line. My idea was to write a musical/dramatic work that could, with different direction, be realized with different narrative content. In this way, I was following common practice in the dance world, where choreographers routinely adapt music written for another purpose to their own dramatic needs. In this case, a new writer can be brought in to complete the work for each new production…

“…there are a few works (of mine) such as A Madrigal Opera that are completely written in terms of the music but await the contribution of other yet unknown authors in order to be completed for the theater. The results can, of course, be unpredictable. But for those who have the nerves for it, having an open-ended piece of this kind can be very exciting.”