‘Europeras 3 & 4’ Review: John Cage’s Controlled Chaos

Detroit Opera presents two of the avant-garde composer’s rigidly devised but cacophonous works, jumbling together various arias and piano works from music history into a disorienting whole.

By Heidi Waleson 

March 12, 2024

Kisma Jordan

PHOTO: AUSTIN RICHEY

Detroit

 What happens when you put classic European operas into a Mixmaster on stage? You get John Cage’s cycle “Europeras 1-5,” a series of happenings devised between 1987 and 1991. Yuval Sharon’s Detroit Opera staging of “Europeras 3 & 4” at the Gem Theatre last weekend, an explosion of controlled chaos, was entertaining and maddening at the same time.

Per Cage’s instructions, “Europera 3” features six singers, two pianists and 12 record players. Each singer selects six arias; each pianist chooses 70 excerpts, ranging from one to 16 bars, from Liszt’s “Opera Phantasien.” The piece lasts exactly 70 minutes. That’s the raw material. When each element will be performed, and where the singers stand on the stage—a grid of 64 numbered squares—was determined through a computer program simulating the chance operations of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination manual. Thus, in performance, the different musical elements, which also include snippets from 78-rpm opera records played on the turntables, have nothing to do with each other.

The resulting musical experience is often cacophonous, and the listener must suspend all auditory expectations. Rhythms, keys and sonorities clash; bits of melody arise from the aural stew and are subsumed again. A singer starts an aria alone; the piano suddenly enters and you expect an accompaniment, but the music is from a completely different work. Opera fans are tempted to play “name that tune”—it’s not the point, and it’s a difficult task given the total lack of musical and theatrical context and how many musical elements are happening simultaneously. I couldn’t resist the game, and recognized only about half of the arias.

Rolfe Dauz and Biba Bell

PHOTO: AUSTIN RICHEY

Mr. Sharon likens the piece to a circus, and in his cleverly devised staging there was always something to catch the eye, albeit not necessarily in any straightforward way. Cage’s instructions specify that costumes and props, drawn from the company’s collection, also be chosen by chance, making for interesting opportunities. Soprano Kisma Jordan sang “V’adoro pupille,” Cleopatra’s seduction aria from Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” while threatening a dancer with a knife and leaving him for dead at the end. Weapons and killing are certainly operatic tropes: Soprano Melanie Spector, singing Marguerite’s ecstatic “Jewel Song” from Gounod’s “Faust,” brandished a shotgun and mimed firing it during one stretch of elaborate ascending coloratura. A giant tombstone, a cake and a television remote control were also in the mix.

Yuki Nakase Link’s lighting contributed to the sense of randomness with flashes and roving spotlights, sometimes illuminating the performers and sometimes not. The backdrop, a giant digital clock in an elaborate, old-fashioned gold frame, counted up the seconds. Moníka Essen was the production designer; Suzanne Hanna the costume coordinator. Here, too, the juxtapositions were often unexpected: Baritone Rolfe Dauz sang Papageno’s “suicide” aria from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” costumed as a toreador.

There’s no room for subtlety in this situation, especially when you may be singing your aria upstage, out of the light, and in tandem with numerous other musical happenings, to say nothing of someone riding a bicycle in front of you or sweeping the floor. Jennifer Cresswell proved hard to miss with her big soprano and commanding stage presence; her performance included a lengthy, nonvocal staged sequence involving a set of door keys before she finally burst into Donna Elvira’s furious “Mi tradi” from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Interestingly, baritone Robert Wesley Mason stood out with one of the evening’s quieter pieces—Billy’s imprisonment aria from Britten’s “Billy Budd,” but perhaps that was because it was in English. In opera, everything stops for the tenor, but not here, which meant that River Guard’s performances of classic tenor arias were often drowned in the mayhem. The able pianists were John Etsell and Marina Stojanovksa; black-clad dancers Biba Bell, Celia Benvenutti and Chris Woolfolkcarried props and interacted with the singers; the 78s on the record players produced a low, accompanying rumble of sound.

Melanie Spector and Ms. Jordan

PHOTO: AUSTIN RICHEY

“Europera 4” had a very different vibe. It was more intimate, with just two singers on a dim stage with chairs placed on three sides—a song recital rather than a circus. The digital clock was still there, this time counting up to 30 minutes. Mezzo Susan Graham and bass-baritone Davóne Tines, their unaccompanied arias overlapping, enacted clashing emotions in song and action—Ms. Graham’s frantic despair as she paced the stage in Dido’s farewell scene from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” contrasted with Mr. Tines’s calm delivery and robotic walk in “Leave me, loathsome light” from Handel’s “Semele.” After their first arias, the two opera stars sat in silence for two minutes before Mr. Tines launched into a powerful “It is enough” from Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” and started throwing chairs around. Perhaps the most dramatic moment arrived about midway, when Ms. Stojanovska finally started to play, layering Liszt’s elaborate, ebullient take on Verdi’s “Rigoletto” over the somber German pieces of the two singers; a few moments later, a scratchy old recording of a tenor was added to the mix.

There was an autumnal quality to “Europera 4,” particularly since Ms. Graham’s final piece was Cherubino’s “Non so piu cosa son” from Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” A diva in her 60s depicting a randy adolescent boy—a role usually sung by a mezzo at the start of her career—could suggest that the days of those operas are gone or that meaning doesn’t matter. “Europeras 3 & 4” presents the audience with the ingredients of opera, shaken and stirred, leaving us to decide what to make of it. For an audience that doesn’t know the arias and the stories, the untranslated texts might be saying anything; the intense emotions they express—fury, frustration, joy, despair, love—are easily flipped by the staging to mean something completely different while their large-scale expressive style slips easily into caricature. With storytelling and emotional content stripped away, what is left? An art form that is chopped into bits and repurposed, a recycling process that has transformed plastic bottles into tote bags, obliterating the living essence of the original.

---

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).