Music by John Cage

Los Angeles Philharmonic and The Industry
SONY Pictures Studios
Culver City, California
November 6-11, 2018

Director: Yuval Sharon
Scenic Designer: John Lacovelli
Music Advisor: Marc Lowenstein
Lighting Designer: Chris Kuhl
Sound Designer: Jody Elff
Associate Director: Alexander Gedeon
LA Phil New Music Group
The Industry

Cheekily titled Europeras—both a pun on “European operas” and “your operas”—John Cage’s first opera explodes the European opera repertoire into a collage of arias and duets, performed alongside a live orchestra and a pre-taped mix of 101 layered opera fragments. In keeping with the composer’s pioneering embrace of indeterminacy, the structure of the opera is entirely dictated by chance as a computer simulation of the I Ching selects which arias will be sung, where, and by whom. Further complicating matters is Cage’s requirement that the producing company pull costumes and props from its archives, creating a material counterpart to the collage of music, drama, and time. The end result is a shocking, humorous, and sometimes moving portrait not only of operatic history, but of the passage of time itself. 

With much of the opera left to chance, Sharon’s 2018 production, a collaboration between his company The Industry and the LA Phil, turned to the location for inspiration, drawing upon Cage’s period as a student of Arnold Schoenberg. Whereas Schoenberg saw cinema as a successor to opera—an interplay of sound, drama, and visual art, recorded perfectly and able to be reproduced reliably time and time again—Cage instead saw the artform as the backbone of a uniquely American take on the genre. Pulling from this history, Sharon staged Europeras 1 & 2 in a Sony Pictures soundstage, using props and sets from films in place of the opera company archives called for in the score.

Photography provided courtesy of the the LA Phil/The Industry.