Deborah Nelson:
Good evening on behalf of the Division of the Arts and Humanities at the University of Chicago, welcome to the third and final installment of the 2025 Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lecture Series. I'm Deborah Nelson, the dean of the division.
Tonight we are so lucky to have Yuval Sharon with us to conclude his three-part lecture, Anarchy at the Opera, including a special performance of John Cage's Europera Number 5 following his talk. Every year the Berlin Family Lectures allow us to invite a world-class scholar, writer, or artist to deliver an extended series of public lectures, contribute to the university's intellectual community, and prepare a manuscript for publication at the University of Chicago Press. We are so grateful to Yuval Sharon for sharing his creative and scholarly brilliance with our community, both through these lectures and also with his extended collaborations with our faculty and students. On behalf of the University of Chicago, thank you Yuval.
And thank you to the generosity and vision of Randy and Melvin Berlin whose support enhances our entire university and amplifies the impact of our community of scholars, artists, and students. Next year's Berlin Family Lecture will be presented by the internationally acclaimed writer, Yiyun Li, the author of 11 books that have been translated into 20 languages. Her new memoir was just featured on the front page of the New York Times and we're excited to host her next year. Dates will be announced shortly. I hope you'll join us.
I'd now like to welcome to this stage my colleague David Levin who will introduce Yuval. David is the Alice H. and Stanley G. Harris Jr. Distinguished Professor of Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, Theater and Performance studies in the college. David can take a long time to introduce, but I won't take a long time. The length of the list of his accomplishments is matched by both the breadth of his research and his leadership at the University of Chicago, but I will try to be brief.
David is the author of three books on opera. For 10 years, he was the executive director of Opera Quarterly, published by Oxford University Press. He's currently co-editor with Mary Ann Smart of the University of Chicago Press's book series Opera Lab, Explorations in History, Technology and Performance. He has taught at Columbia University, the Free University of Berlin, and the universities of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Konstanz, Mainz, and Oslo. At UChicago, David served as the founding director of the Grace Center for Arts and Inquiry and the senior advisor to the Provost for the Arts. More recently, David has helped lead a new arts lab at UChicago's Neubauer Collegium, an arts research project that has included close collaboration with Yuval Sharon on a variety of projects including the Metropolitan Opera's recently announced production of Wagner's Ring Cycle, the most ambitious work in all of opera, and the first part of which will be the highlight of the Met's 2027/2028 season.
Without further ado, please join me in welcoming professor David Levin.
David Levin:
Thank you so much Debbie, and good evening. It's a distinct honor to introduce the third and final installment in this year's Berlin Family Lectures. As you all know, this final lecture is not only a lecture but also a performance. And it's this conjunction that I'd like to focus on in these brief introductory remarks. For here we are at the University of Chicago, an institution that for generations has committed itself quite famously and quite steadfastly to the rigorous theorization and historicization of art, but that just as steadfastly maintained a certain, how to put this tactfully, a certain wariness of artistic practice.
Indeed, when discussions about building an interdisciplinary arts center at the University of Chicago were just underway in the late 1990s, the Dean of Humanities at the time, the preeminent musicologist, Philip Gossett, a scholar of Verdi and Rossini, noted with an operatic fervor for which he was famous, that an art center might be appropriate for a place like Princeton, which he noted had plenty of playgrounds, but that an art center had no place at the University of Chicago, which eschewed playgrounds in favor of serious and emphatically Spartan spaces of study.
As my kids say, that was then, and this is now. And here we are some 25 years later in the presence of my colleague and friend Debbie Nelson, Dean of the newly rechristened Division of the Arts and Humanities at the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. The Logan Center for the Arts, a place that has since its opening in 2012, affected a thorough going transformation in how we at the University of Chicago grasp the imbrication of creativity and thought.
And if over the course of the past generation or so fun has affected something of a turnaround on our campus such that the University of Chicago is no longer necessarily the place where fun comes to die, I think we can also say with some confidence that the arts have come to thrive here as well. I'm not sure that these two developments are related, although who knows, but after 13 years in operation, it appears that artistic practice such as that cultivated here at the Logan Center is not so much anathema to the life of the mind, but is indeed fundamental to the life of the mind, an essential expression of it.
And who better to make that argument, an argument about the imbrication of creative practice and rigorous thought than Yuval Charon? Over the course of just the past 20 years, Yuval has developed a career directing at many of the world's most important opera houses. I'll list some of them, the Bayreuth Festival, the Staatsoper Berlin, the Santa Fe Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and beginning next year at the Metropolitan Opera.
In 2010, he founded The Industry, an enormously influential experimental opera company based in L.A. And let's just let that fact reverberate for a moment, that there could be something in 21st century North America that can accurately be described as an enormously influential experimental opera company. And in 2020 he was appointed the Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director at the Detroit Opera.
The past 20 plus years of creative experimentation provided the basis for the publication, as many of you know, last year of Yuval's wonderfully stimulating book, A New Philosophy of Opera. His creative and intellectual ambitions in turn brought him to the University of Chicago where Yuval has been a global solutions fellow at our Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society for the past two years, and where over the course of the past two weeks in the course of his first two Berlin Family Lectures, he's been making the case not so much for the inherent vitality of opera, but much more cannily and surprisingly for a vision of opera revitalized on the basis of a thorough going reconceptualization of the power structures governing its presentation and the aesthetic politics of its expression, arguing in favor of a recognition and celebration not of opera's lassoing capacities, its capacity to marshal and subdue disparate expressive channels into a single overarching message, which is the logic and ambition of Wagner's total work of art, but rather a celebration of what we might call opera's rowdy potential, its capacities to express differently, to express in ways that are unpredictable, generative, surprising.
For the past two weeks, this has been a theoretical argument or indeed it's been a theoretically inflected romp. And today as a culminating gesture as we reach the conclusion of Yuval's argument, he would have us turn from lecture to performance here at the Logan Center here at the University of Chicago. It's a logical and exhilarating culmination for where Yuval's creative thinking has been taking us, and for where the arts and humanities at the University of Chicago are going. I wish Philip Gossett were here to experience it. I know that he would be thrilled. Of course, I'm delighted that all of us are here to experience it at this transformational moment in this transformational space. Please join me in welcoming Yuval Sharon back to the stage of the Logan Center for his final Berlin Family Lecture of 2025, John Cage and Anarchic Opera to be followed by a performance of John Cage's Europera 5.
Yuval Sharon:
Hello. Thank you for that beautiful introduction, Debbie and David. Yes, joy, the happiness, and fun, and play of opera and the arts is what I was talking about over the last two lectures and what I hope you will experience in this particular lecture.
A brief recap of the chief topics. I started this lecture series by defining anarchy and opera because they are are two topics that have a lot of different associations and a lot of different ideas. Anarchy I came to define as a very friendly, very open-minded, very temporary kind of power structure that is always changing based on the needs of the moment. Something that is always expanding our horizons. And opera is something that is unstable, and shifting, and also changing with the times, two different forms that really in the end have a lot to say to each other as maybe antithetical as they might seem.
In my first lecture I posed the question, what an anarchic opera look and sound like. And you might have imagined an opera, which is more often... By the way, this is the title of this particular lecture, John Cage's... I slightly changed it as I worked on the lecture, John Cage's Joyous Anarchy. So David, thank you for teeing that up so well.
And you might have imagined that opera, which is normally organized with this kind of structure. If you've been at the last two lectures, you've seen me talk about opera structured in this incredibly hierarchical kind of way that if we're normally thinking of opera in this kind of way, that this is what anarchic opera actually looks like, or it's certainly how it feels like. And I wouldn't blame you if this is what you were expecting, but as I argued over the last two lectures, that this is not what all anarchists are ultimately advocating and it's certainly not the kind of anarchy that I want to cultivate in opera.
Because opera in the end, as we know, cannot be a free-for-all. It must be the result of a coordinated effort and decision-making between directors and conductors, ultimately having the task of leading the creation and the performance of any operatic production. But that leadership like anarchic leadership must be responsive and needs to feel more like this if it is going to lead to the mutual aid and the mutual flourishing that my kind of anarchists like to imagine.
Still, what kind of opera does that actually produce? As a grand finale to this series, tonight's lecture is going to offer, as David has mentioned, a different kind of format than the other two. I'm going to give a shorter lecture tonight that is going to then lead to the performance of John Cage's Europera 5. This is the fifth in a cycle of pieces. I'm going to introduce those pieces over the course of this particular lecture. We're going to take a short little break between the lecture and the performance to get set up. And the performance is exactly 60 minutes. So just so that you have that idea in mind and what that break might be used for if you need to. And that'll give you a little bit of a microcosm of what an anarchic performance might really be like.
In the first lecture and also in the second lecture I talked about this very unlikely alliance, the alliance between Richard Wagner and John Cage, to me the two most prominent musical anarchists in history. And the last lecture I really looked at Wagner's historical interest in anarchism. This is the wanted poster for Wagner after he fled Dresden from the 1849 uprising. And I argued in the last lecture, I guess you'll eventually be able to watch it online as a streamed lecture, but until then just fill you in on what I discussed, I basically argued that you cannot understand Wagner's Ring Cycle the most, as Debbie said, the most ambitious opera in the entire canon, that you can't actually understand it without knowing the anarchists who inspired him like Proudhon, Bakunin, and Max Stirner when he was still first conceiving of this very epic cycle. And part of that anarchic origin was the desire to create his own theater that would be burned down at the end of the first performance along with his score, that all of it would be destroyed.
And I want to pick up on that idea as I transition into talking about John Cage because there was a really interesting question last time from an audience member that I wanted to pick up. And that is that the question, is it really the fate of all radical artists to eventually become tamed by their own vanity and by institutionalization when they become part of the canon, kind of like what we see right here?
So with Wagner who in the end decided to neither burn down the theater that he built or destroy the score that he wrote, there's a sense that that anarchic impulse is now buried under layers of institutionalization. And nowadays, as I think we all know, we are far more likely to associate Wagner with fascism than we are with anarchy. And the opera that Wagner created, which he specifically imagined as the artwork of the future has started to become suffocating for future artists because of its reception history. Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which imagined the total work of art as a complete integration of all of the elements of an operatic performance into an artistic whole, was developed in exile. This is an idea that he created from afar as he's fleeing the anarchic revolution. And this is at also a time where Germany is not a unified country, but a series of fractured city-states, not a single nationhood. And in this moment of a fractured social reality, he created this dream of Gesamtkunstwerk, a unifying idea, something that was going to through art ennoble and inspire a sense of unity.
But as we know, nationhood became patriotism, which became jingoism, which became fascism. And artists like Bertolt Brecht started to resist the Wagnerian lure of totalization. And Brecht himself famously described the Gesamtkunstwerk as a kind of witch's brew in which the spectator was robbed of all of their critical faculties in order to lose themselves in the illusionistic and seamless world of the unity of word, and image, and text. So Brecht argued for the elements, word, and image, and text, to be actively separated so that the spectator has the ability to take a position to each of those individual elements. And instead of getting swept away into the kind of irresistible aesthetics of fascism in its black, and white, and red look, the Brechtian theater trained the spectator to sharpen their senses and to read patterns. And so instead of falling asleep to totalitarian visions, which is what the Wagnerian Music theater started to really represent, the modern spectator would wake up to new social possibilities, which for Brecht was Marxist social possibilities.
So even without the political dimension here, it is remarkable that the Anarchist Wagner has also inspired the most rabidly conservative fans of any operatic composers. When Patrice Chéreau first premiered his 1976 Ring Cycle in Bayreuth, the reaction was so vociferous from incensed Wagnerians that they protested out the outside the theater with signs that echoed the libretto itself saying, "This ring is cursed." And they were holding up these signs and so mad about this particular production. And I also remember in the early two thousands going to Berlin and seeing a production of Tannhäuser where this gentleman was red in the face at an audience talkback because he said, "This is not Tannhäuser. Wolfram does not play the piano, he plays the harp." I mean, he just could not understand the changes that were being made.
Now you don't get that mad when you love Donizetti. I don't know what is it about Wagner that inspires this kind of vitriol. So it seems that even a titan like Wagner cannot necessarily escape the process where his radicality becomes a repository for a reactionary impulse. So as an alternative to that de-evolution, I think John Cage offers an amazing alternative and especially in his cycle, Europeras 1 and 2, Europeras 3 and 4, and Europera 5. And in my own mind, I've started to think about this particular kind of non-cycle of these five works as a kind of anti-Ring Cycle in a way. And maybe I think of that as only fitting because after this evening I will have directed all five of them. So I'm very excited about that particular feat, and as a preparation for doing the Ring Cycle.
And so where Brecht was talking about the independence of the elements, John Cage practiced something much more anarchic, a compositional method that he called... Oh, I'm sorry, I skipped over this particular idea. This is a book that I didn't want to recommend. In case you are interested in writers and thinkers, this is Alain Badiou's Five Lessons on Wagner, which is a great book of people who are trying to make the case for a liberal and progressive view of Wagner, not the kind of fascist view that we tend to really think about. So people like Badiou are really trying, but it's really hard because we do have this conventional wisdom of who Wagner is.
In any case, back to Cage. Interpenetration was this key word for Cage, something much more anarchic, a compositional method and a word that I think will serve as both a social and musical principle that is on display in the Europeras. There really is no introduction that I can make to John Cage that cannot start without the story of his visit to an anechoic chamber in Harvard where he described hearing one high sound, which was... First of all, and if you don't know this, an anechoic chamber is a room that is designed to have almost no sound at all. Through a deadening process, it's meant to be the quietest rooms possible, and as if a space where silence is actually possible.
So John Cage goes into one of these rooms and he realizes that actually he does hear two very key things. He hears first of all one very high sound, which he realizes is his own nervous system in operation, and when very low sound, which is his own blood in circulation. And he discovers something very important. He discovers that there is no such thing as silence. And to demonstrate that he created his most famous piece, which asks an instrumentalist or a group of instrumentalists to sit at their instrument for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds, and in three movements to let the ambient and unexpected sounds that emerge to become the musical score.
In 1990, nearly 40 years after visiting that anechoic chamber, Cage went back to Harvard to deliver the Norton Lectures there. And he described the experience of going to that chamber as, "Giving his life direction, the exploration of non-intention. I gave up making choices. In their place, I put the asking of questions." And the title of those lectures carry the 15 organizing principles of his composition that he retrospectively named as such, method, structure, intention, discipline, notation, indeterminacy, interpenetration, imitation, devotion, circumstances, variable structure, non-understanding, contingency, inconsistency, performance.
Now, as you can tell, that might not have a lot to do with Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. These are different elements that all might have a lot more associated with the kind of project that Cage really is best known for, which are, we know of as happenings where music, and movement, and visuals, and text were arranged as interdependent elements, elements that would interpenetrate, defying the totalizing organization of conventional composition.
The critical aspect of interpenetration is that decisions are made independently without the consultation or consensus of other performers. There is no attempt at interaction, just simultaneous coexistence where people miraculously stay out of each other's way. Tonalities don't travel the well-worn paths that they are used to. And guess what? Something emerges that we would've never consciously chosen. On the surface it may appear disconnected and fractured, but as Cagean performance goes on, a moment usually occurs where you suddenly realize that everything is connected.
The final work in Cage always seems to reflect the will of no single participant. This is a quote from Cage, "I think things interpenetrate more richly and with more complexity when I myself do not establish any connection, that is when they meet and form the number one. And since each one is itself, there is a plurality in the number one." And I think that's an interesting thought to bring back to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, the idea of making a unity. And maybe that is actually what Wagner wanted, a kind of plurality within that sense of oneness.
Now, if conventional wisdom has this view of Wagner as a fascist when he was actually, has anarchist roots at least, then there is likewise I think a deep misperception of Cage when we consider him only as a detached Zen Buddhist urging us to drop out of the world with a benevolent smile. I think Cage showed a deep political engagement throughout his entire career in works that even just by naming the titles, I think you'll get a sense of what he was interested in. He has pieces that are called things like Credo in Us, In the Name of the Holocaust, and I think my favorite title, How to Improve the World, in parentheses, You'll Only Make Things Worse. And next season at Detroit Opera, I will stage his work, Apartment House 1776, a Vision of American Diversity, which he wrote to mark the bicentennial in 1976.
Anarchy was a lifelong interest of John Cage. He had a highly pragmatic and generous view of anarchy light years away from the kind of anarchy that we associate with Molotov cocktails and Wagner making hand grenades with Bakunin. He has this great quote from his book a year from Monday where he says, "I'm an anarchist the same as you when you're telephoning, turning on or off the lights, or drinking water." It was something that was so every day. And when Cage was a teacher, he used a kind of teaching method that feels very rooted to anarchic educational methods, which is rather than assigning every single student the same book and then creating a kind of competition between all his students to see who understood this book the best, he would have everybody read a different book and come to class bringing different knowledge to the class, a kind of foraging technique as opposed to a competitive technique. So these are the ways in which anarchy found their way in Cage's view of every day life.
And beyond that, there is a really wonderful way in which anarchy appeared in his 1970 collection of solos that he calls the Song Books. There's a paraphrase from Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. The way that Cage paraphrased it was, "The best form of government is no government at all," and that's the kind we will have when we are ready for it. And this particular line is among 99 potential solos. This one is singled out as having multiple potential renderings. And Cage has the instruction that the soloist should perform the song either while waving a flag of the whole earth or with the black flag of anarchy. And so anarchy shows up again and again.
According to William Brooks in the Cambridge Guide to John Cage, he writes, "In a substantial number of works spanning almost his entire career, John Cage attempted to present a model of or an analog to one or more aspects of utopian society. And at the interplay of individual initiative and collective responsibility is meant in part to represent the workings of a more ideal society." It seems that Cage would've really resonated deeply with an idea that I brought up in the first lecture, which is from Heiner Müller, where he said that theater is a laboratory of social fantasy, this notion that what we are presenting on the stage is an opportunity to imagine different ways of being together and organizing ourselves.
Brooks also cites John Cage's Musicircus, which in this particular case at the University of Illinois, had a fantastic hack of the Wagner bust that I showed earlier, so I just had to show that as part of this particular slideshow. Brooks says that the most striking form of anarchy in Cage's repertoire was this particular piece called Musicircus, "A work so anti-authoritarian that Cage never even wrote a score for it since no performing forces are specified, no time lengths, no coordination, no director, Musicircus is an invitation rather than a directive. Musicians of whatever persuasion are invited to occupy a certain space or spaces for a certain time. This brings about neither ensemble nor counterpoint, but rather simply coexistence. Sounds are both discrete and interconnected. Both musicians and spectators have the opportunity to situate their understanding at any point on the spectrum between individuation and aggregation."
And recounting a 1992 performance of Musicircus, Brooks described the primary principles that govern the event in this way, "Non-hierarchical distribution of sounds and performers, a non-commercial basis for participation, an absence of distinctions or categories, and a deliberate lack of focus, all these are necessary corollaries of anarchy as Cage conceives of it. Musicircus becomes, in fact not so much a model of anarchy as an example of it."
So Cage also published a poetic work entitled Anarchy one year after he wrote Europeras 1 and 2, which unpacked sentences by Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, and Proudhon, now names who may be familiar to people who have been to the last two lectures to see what other ideas might reside in this writing. And in his introduction to the work he said, "My mesostics texts do not make ordinary sense. They make nonsense." And this quote in particular I think really relates to the Europera Cycle. He quotes Marshall McLuhan who says, "We now brush information against information. We are doing everything we can to make new connections." So we're going to get back to that quote in just a minute, but I think this in many ways is exactly what Cage was interested in doing.
But what is so interesting is that even though Cage was interested in anarchy his entire career, he waits until he writes his first opera to actually publish something, publish this collection of mesostics on anarchy. Could it be that just as he's entering this most hierarchical of art forms that he feels the most inspired to explore anarchy in this particular way? This just seems to me not a direct coincidence. There must be something about this timing that must have been the case.
In her dissertation on Cage's Europeras 1 and 3, Laura Kuhn, who is here tonight, thank you Laura for joining us, she not only draws the connection between Cage's, first operatic work with his anarchic leanings, but with his aesthetic interest in collage. Kuhn makes collage sound like a quintessentially anarchic art form because traditional organizational principles like composition, balance, foreground and background, perspective and verisimilitude, luminescence and so on are all chopped up, tossed around, and reconfigured. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg created collage works through juxtaposition and silk-screening images on top of one another to create something new from constituent parts. In some of Rauschenberg's assemblages, everyday objects like tires or chicken heads jutted off the two-dimensional plane off the canvas, and where reproductions of the Mona Lisa could coexist with clippings from that day's newspaper.
In the same way Cage may ask a virtuosic pianist to perform while the radio's playing or whatever happens to be on at that moment while someone else might be typing a letter to a friend. The beautiful, the everyday, the conventional, the extraordinary, the grotesque, and the quotidian are all reconfigured in a way that reflects the extreme fragmentation of reality we experience beyond the traditional frame. "We are not arranging things in order (that's the function of utilities); we are merely facilitating processes so that anything can happen," says John Cage in his text M.
So historical facts can let us draw the connection ourselves between Cage and artists like Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns because they were part of the same social and artistic circles. But Kuhn's really brilliant insight in her dissertation is to explore how opera itself is a site of reinterpretation, and that makes it a platform that is perfectly positioned for Cagean collage. The idea that opera's preexisting materials could be rearranged like collage, and recombined and restructured so that something new can emerge is a remarkable insight that for Cage had profound philosophical implications.
So now a little bit about the Europeras. Europeras 1 and 2 was commissioned by Frankfurt Opera as a grand opening for the new leadership of Gary Bertini in 1987. It is a new direction relatively late in John Cage's life. It coincided with his 75th birthday and just five years before his death in 1992. And needless to say, it was not the commission that Bertini had in mind. He probably had in mind a fairly straightforward, a commission score that would then enter the annals of great operatic, the great operatic canon. Okay? And instead what he got was Cage ransacking the canon and turning it inside out. With his well-known use of chance-based operations, arias and snippets from all over the operatic canon were taken and reassembled into something completely original. Chance-based operations also dictated where on a grid of 64 squares singers and dancers should be positioned, as well as where their entrances were and all of their actions. Independent elements of sound and lighting are not meant to be subservient to the event but are meant to be artistic processes all on their own.
The governing principle is duration, a fixed and totally scientific measure of time of 90 minutes for Europera 1 and 75 minutes for Europera 2. So you can imagine there's an incoming conductor who wants to have this glorious opening night with their fantastic new opera that they commissioned and he's replaced by a clock, so not exactly what he imagined. But what Cage did create was a kind of entire history of American opera as one teeming ocean of sight and sound liberated from its original confinement and made new through new connections. And that's where the name Europera originally came from. John Cage has this very famous quip, which is actually in the score, "For two hundred years, Europe has been sending us their operas. Now I'm sending them back."
But the premiere was not quite as auspicious as Cage might've hoped. Singers resisted this approach very strongly. They saw an irreverence to the music that they learned to love in only one way and really did not appreciate Cage's approach. And as a truly ominous sign, the Frankfurt Opera burned down days before the premiere. So for those of you that were here last week, you might be saying, "Careful what you wish for." But actually I kept thinking in many ways, and I know Laura was there, we haven't been able to talk about it, but in many ways I can't imagine any other opera that could so easily have just picked up and moved to a different theater than the Europeras. But anyway, there's really no other piece that's quite as much about the circumstances that you perform it in as this one.
Nevertheless, despite it being a controversial and in some ways disastrous beginning, Cage kept at it, even after Europeras 1 and 2. Three years later, he premiered Europeras 3 and 4. This is a picture of our performance of it at the Detroit Opera last year. This premiered at the Almeida Theater in London. The forces now were smaller. It wasn't as large as 1 and 2. And instead of a large orchestra there were pianos.
I want to just say briefly, this was commissioned, 3 and 4 was commissioned by director Pierre Audi, who just two weeks ago passed away very suddenly from a heart attack. So I would like to dedicate tonight's performance of Europera 5 to his memory.
Europera 5 finally is the smallest and most intimate work of what makes up in a way a kind of informal cycle. It premiered in 1991 in Buffalo, New York. And a 1992 performance at MoMA, as I understand it was the last performance of Cage's own work that he was able to see while he was alive.
If you compare the forces then, you see a kind of gradual narrowing of the forces from 1 through 5. And this is slightly misleading because 1 and 2 are kind of one piece like act one and act two of one opera. Act 3 and 4 are also like an act one and act two. You can't perform them independently. So audiences that see 1 and 2, you feel the difference between 1 and 2, and you feel the difference between 3 and 4. Tonight you're going to see just 5 as a standalone piece. Well, I guess you're going to feel the difference between me talking for 40 minutes and 5, so there's going to be some contrast.
But I just want to point out one thing that I have been experiencing now that I'm going through this entire arc. Notice how in 4 that the forces are pretty similar. We have the same solo pianist in 4 and 5. We have only two singers now. It's gone smaller and smaller and smaller, but the time, the duration has doubled with only one additional aria being asked of the singers. And that has an enormous impact on the amount of space that is given to this particular performance in 5.
I have discovered in last night's rehearsal that there is an incredible beauty in the silence around Europera 5, but we'll see what happens tonight. It's going to be its own thing, so I don't want to anticipate it too too much. But it is remarkable that there is a process happening from Europera 1 to Europera 5. And it seems a little too simple to just say that Cage was only interested in sending back all of the operas. That can't be the only thing at play here because he did that with Europeras 1 and 2. That was done, right? So why did he need to go back to 3 and 4 and 5?
I think on one hand, Cage must have seen in this theatrical realization of an operatic Cage, the possibility of Müller's laboratory of fantasy. Like he's getting closer and closer to that joyful, friendly anarchy that animates all his work. And maybe in its most intimate form in this Europera 5, maybe he actually captures it. And maybe he was trying to get to a format that would resist that move that happened to Wagner, which is getting institutionalized and getting caught up in the large mechanism of opera. He saw what happened at Frankfurt with 1 and 2, and realized maybe I need to go somewhere else. Maybe I need to change my forces and go in a different direction.
And remembering by the way that performance being one of his compositional methods, remembering that to truly keep the anarchic spirit alive, performance is really at the heart of everything, not holding things into an institution, that this was part of the compositional technique that really can hold his philosophy better than anything.
And one other thing that really I think retains the integrity of an anarchic thinking for Cage is his attitude to the score. Last week I talked about the score as relatively restrictive in opera, as something that is now becoming somewhat of an inhibiting factor. If opera originally was something that the score was almost more of a suggestion where so much was left out, we now have the score as a kind of imprisonment, as something that if we turn 90 degrees actually resembles prison bars. This notion that we have as interpreters, we've confused the map for the territory in this case in considering the score a divinity rather than the blueprint that it is.
The Europeras doesn't have a score in the conventional sense, it has a set of instructions. And they take some deciphering, but these instructions ensure that there are no two performances of the Europeras that could ever be quite like the other. It makes these pieces an entirely open-ended work. This is not specific to just the Europeras, this is something we see in all of John Cage's work. But to take opera, which is so devotional as it relates to the score and bring this kind of thinking to it is something that I find so refreshing every single time I do one of the pieces.
But there is an important distinction here as it relates to something I talked about last week, and that's the role of improvisation. It's important to note that the Europeras does not feature any improvisation. Cage's attitude towards improvisation was complicated. You may have noted that he really did not include improvisation in his compositional techniques that I showed. I mentioned last week that improvisation saved the day in one of the performances that I did, Sweet Land where the alternative to the rigidity of the written score actually cultivated in all of the cast an ability to be flexible and to deal with big changes. So that's something that I've been really interested in as an anarchic principle.
But Cage was a little bit less interested in improvisation because he wanted things to be quite set, as a once things were set, he wanted the performers to stay connected to exactly what was agreed upon. And this was really important to him because what he was after in the sense of the interpenetration, he needed everyone to agree to a set idea because he did not want suddenly the performer to bring undue attention to themselves. This is something that he would see often in some of his performances where improvisation would become an opportunity for a virtuosic display of an individual's ego. It would become something that could show people what they would do and would allow them to feel like there was a free for all. And Cage was not interested in a free for all. He wanted a mutual flourishing. He wanted the interpenetration that required everyone to really follow what was agreed upon.
So he believed in freedom, but that freedom had conditions, or to use another one of his great compositional techniques, circumstances. And this is the kind of anarchism that I've been defining over the last couple lectures, not the kind that sends us into direction of libertarianism, lacking any kind of responsibility to any other human being, but the opposite, a sense of what I described in the first lecture as mutual flourishing. It's freedom within the limits of preserving as much freedom for other people as possible. And you see this in Cage's music as early as 1948 when he describes as creating a perception through the music of a natural friendliness, which has the aspect of a festival.
So in the Europeras, each performer is going to get their own flow chart in which most decisions have been dictated by chance. And that means their entrances, their exits with where they sit on the stage, where they're going to stand on the grid, what order their arias are performed in, the start time of each aria, what action they do, all of that was done by consulting computerized etching program. In tonight's performance, the five arias have been assigned one of the five genres, as I call it. There is an aria performed as if it's in concert. There is an aria performed with a prop which was also chosen through chance operations. There's an aria performed with a piece of furniture, again chosen through chance operations, an aria performed with a dancer's interaction, and an aria performed off-stage.
They will be performed by the baritone Rolf Dauz, who was a performer in my production of Europera 3 at Detroit Opera, and the soprano Whitney Morrison, who lives in this very neighborhood and who has been a cherished colleague of mine over several productions. And she even gets appearance in my book, A new Philosophy of Opera. I want to mention that Whitney is recovering from an illness and wanted to make sure you knew that she was not singing at a hundred percent of her capacity. But you know what? In the Cagean ethos, this is what it's all about. These are the circumstances we find ourselves in and these are the circumstances that she's going to perform in. I am sure she's going to deliver as a beautiful and disciplined performance as she can today.
So like all the other Europeras, the organizing principle will be the clock. It's exactly 60 minutes. And in each of my Europera productions, I've liked the audience being able to see the clock. So you are going to be able to watch the clock go by. And I think this is important because I want you to feel like you are a part of the game, you're playing along with us, but I also think it's great that you are aware of the time going by in a way. Sometimes it's going to feel like the seconds are going to be thudding in silence, and there are going to be times where you're going to be carried away by something and you'll suddenly realize eight minutes has gone by and you won't realize how. The experience of time in a Cagean performance is really extraordinary. And I wanted to invite you in to all of that. But every decision has been based on that time code. Again, there's no conductor.
A brief word about chance and why chance is part of that, part of all of this. We have a kind of dismissive attitude towards chance in general in our society because we expect everything should have a capital M meaning. So to leave things to chance seems to imply a shrug of shoulders and who cares. But the Cagean love of chance is really different. It sees potential meaning and potential beauty everywhere. And instead of only experiencing things in the strict structure that we always see and hear them in, it invites a rearrangement, to care very deeply about each and everything. It is to put our own egos in check and to surrender to techniques of indeterminacy and to non-intention rather than to constantly judge according to the well-worn grooves of the records that we've memorized.
The distance between the original story of the operas and the newly devised actions provide a kind of imitation of collage technique, which Laura Kuhn discusses in her dissertation on Europeras 1 and 2. And I just want to mention that some of you that came to the first lecture might recall that I showed this picture of La bohème from the Paris Opera that was set on the moon by the director Claus Guth and might say, "Well, isn't this kind of the same thing?". Like, "Okay, this is like a radical replacement of the opera in a new location." And I just want to say that I think this is actually really a different situation because there is a gulf of intentionality between what the director here did and what John Cage is inviting all of us to do. The directorial displacement here, no doubt required a lot of intentionality and relationality on the part of the director. But in the Europeras, the normal connective tissues are all scrambled. And in that gulf, which chance operations has dictated, the work itself is giving enormous freedom to all of you, the spectator.
And that's something Cage has done his entire career. It's turning the meaning making over to you. He's not taking the conventional position of the composer who arranges everything into a tidy hierarchy with him at the top with all the answers, the one closest to divinity. He's giving everything equal weight in order to give your interpretive power a place in the circle.
I think this is actually most hilariously illustrated by the synopses that he placed in the programs for Europeras 1 and 2, which are randomly generated mashups from across the spectrum of operatic literature, where every 12 people got different synopses. So as opposed to everybody getting the same story, everyone would get a different story. This is just one example out of the 12. I would read it, but I'm running a little bit out of time. So these are all great. And actually when I read them, I kind of think, well, this is kind of how opera synopses sound anyway, they just seem a bit insane. But I wanted to reprint some of these for our particular performance, but I didn't get around to it. But you can make your own story as I feel like what Cage is ultimately really asking.
Cage in the end, I think even though it is hilarious and the very least, is lighthearted, it carries a profound idea that he doesn't want the audience, he doesn't want you and the audience coagulated into some sort of undifferentiated blob. He wants each of you as an individual audience member. In the words of his hero, Marcel Duchamp, "to complete the work yourself". And it remains the reason that Cage's work are both so liberatory for those of us that connect so deeply with his work and his worldview, and so frustrating for audiences brought up on an operatic tradition in which meaning is dictated all the time, and in which everything is explained all the time, and in where the multitudinous forces that animate opera are always funneled into a single idea all the time.
So that's how I want to close this particular lecture and prepare you for the performance, by revisiting the naming of the piece, Europera. And that anecdote around the naming of Europeras 1 and 2, I mentioned there must be more going on here. What could that be? Is this really just Europe's operas that Cage is giving back to us all at once? That surely is too limiting and to oppositional of a stance. He must have given this up.
By the time he got to Europera 5, I really think he wanted to share an anarchic vision that is beautiful in its ability to be quietly free. And as you experience Cage's joyous anarchy for yourself, you may find it freeing. You may find it unbearably moving. You may find it silly. You may find it teeming with meaning. You may find it meaningless. You may find your mind wandering. You may find yourself awestruck at the constituent parts that make up this insane art form called opera, those parts that are usually fused together so seamlessly that you take them for granted. You may hear a work that intimately in a way that you've never experienced surrounded by new harmonies and realize, if I can paraphrase Joni Mitchell, that you really don't know opera at all.
I could give you my advice for how to experience it, which would be to just surrender, and just to give yourself to each moment as the clock ticks by, and simply breathe along with these performers. After all, you're going to be sharing the same oxygen with them for just 60 minutes. But my way is only one way, and this as Jon Cage, so aptly name it, is your opera.
Thank you so much.