La Belle et la Bête

The first and only time I ever saw Philip Glass in person was in 1988 when he came to town for the premiere of his opera The Making of a Representative for Planet 8, based on the short science fiction novel by Doris Lessing. A local movie theater was showing Powaqqatsi, and a signing by Glass was arranged. Some friends and I went to get his autograph and see the movie. Somehow we ended right near the beginning of the line. We walked up top the table where Glass was signing programs and he asked me if the line behind me was very long. I said, “Yeah, pretty long.” He whimpered dejectedly.

I loved the movie (I saw in the theater three times, once while tripping on LSD) and its soundtrack is one of my favorite records. I didn’t go to the opera, though. I think I missed out on what would have been a special experience. (I did attend a talk by Doris Lessing, though—which was excellent.)

Tonight I attended La Belle et la Bête, performed at the Moores Opera House on the campus of the University of Houston. It was performed by a small orchestra of U.H. music students and conducted by Michael Riesman. If you have recordings of Glass’s music, you may already be familiar with Riesman’s name—he is the Music Director of the Philip Glass Ensemble and has recorded many of Glass’s works.

I had heard of his adaptation of La Belle et la Bête (1994) when it was written. Glass composed it to be played along with the 1946 Jean Cocteau movie. The sound in the movie is off; the orchestra and singers in essence take its place. They sing all the words of dialogue that Cocteau wrote, and it is very well-timed to match the movie and the actors. Sometimes modern symphonies will play a movie’s soundtrack with the movie, but that is usually a high-tech affair where the conductor has electronic cues to help keep the orchestra in perfect sync with the movie. Of course, the orchestra in those cases is playing the actual soundtrack.

But in La Belle et la Bête, keeping the music and singing synced up with the movie is a task that the conductor and musicians must accomplish the old-fashioned way. Of course, this was a completely new piece of music—they weren’t reproducing the original score (which was composed by Georges Auric, a French composer who was one of Les Six—a group of composers including Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre). In the introductory comments by Moores Opera Center Music Director Lawrence Edelson, he suggested that Glass got Auric’s OK before composing what was in essence a second score for the film. But since Auric died in 1983, more than 10 years before the opera’s premiere, that seems unlikely.

I remember when I first heard about this project, I had mixed feelings about it. Reading a description of it, it felt like Glass was piggy-backing off Cocteau’s art. That rubbed me wrong, for some reason. Now when I look back on my disdain, it seems ridiculous. Lots of great art is in essence a collaboration with earlier art. Glass’s opera of La Belle et la Bête is really no different from an adaptation of Shakespeare or Charles Gounod’s opera of Faust. And unlike Gounod, Glass is unusually faithful to the original.

The performance was exciting, and seeing the film again was fun. I had forgotten that whenever you see something magic happening on screen, Cocteau has smoke rising from it. It makes the Beast appear to be smoldering. And no matter what Glass does, you are still left with the feeling that Greta Garbo reportedly had when the Beast is turned into a handsome prince: “Give me back my Beast!”

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