Tomorrow, Saturday, David Mattingly’s minimalist-inspired opera “Stranger Love” opens at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
The American composer Dylan Mattingly (Oakland, California, 1991) was never planning to break a record when almost twelve years ago he embarked, together with his friend (and former professor at the private Bard College in New York, where Mattingly also had as teachers and mentors musicians such as John Adams and David Lang), the essayist and writer Thomas Bartscherer, on the creation of an opera. It may even be that the idea came from Bartscherer, after witnessing a concert by Contemporaneous, the chamber orchestra that Mattingly had founded during his studies at Bard. In any case, tomorrow Saturday, at 16:00 PST, the premiere of Stranger Love, the opera with music by Mattingly and libretto by Bartscherer, on which they have been working since 2011 and fragments of which have already been performed in concert, will take place at the Wald Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. But on Saturday (and as the only performance) it will be offered in its entirety, lasting five and a half hours (plus a one-hour “dinner intermission”).
The opera, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but to be performed by Contemporaneous, is the fruit, as the orchestra’s website reads, “of a conversation between Mattingly and librettist Thomas Bartscherer about music and language over many years. It follows two lovers whose romance unfolds to the rhythm of the seasons. Inspired in part by the structure of Plato’s Symposium and set on a vast time scale against the ever-expanding universe, it broadens in scope and frame over the course of three acts, moving from the personal to the archetypical to a vision of the divine—a love supreme”.
Mattingly admits that this opera, at over six and a half hours long, is not a practical idea. “But at a time when everything in our lives is cut shorter and shorter, taking six hours to discover “a world where time bends to love like gravity, and moments of bliss, of fear and of rapture—the moments in which you’ve felt most alive—are the pillars that hold up the fabric of the stars” is entirely the point. Not practical? Perhaps. But in this modern world, it might be essential.”
The New York Times, drawing on the known excerpts from Stranger Love, has compared this opera to two other long compositions that maintain for many hours a tone of meditative ecstasy, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach and Olivier Messiaen’s St. Francis of Assisi, although their musicality is much closer to Glass’s early minimalism, present in the score’s vast expanses of shifting harmonies and repetitive rhythms, and to the deceptively simple sound world of Meredith Monk’s Atlas, which, as stated in the aforementioned newspaper article, Mattingly listened to every night (literally) for a year before he began Stranger Love.