Here’s the thing about Glass hauling Disney’s corpse onto the stage at Teatro Real, it’s got that particular American genius for taking something everybody thinks they understand and then shoving it into the meat grinder until nobody’s quite sure what they’re looking at anymore.
The Madrid premiere went up in January 2013, and you’ve got to appreciate the chutzpah of debuting your twenty-fourth opera about the guy who weaponized anthropomorphic mice. Glass at 75, still grinding those arpeggios like he’s got something to prove, which maybe he does. The minimalism’s gotten warmer, less like staring at fluorescent lights in a waiting room, more like those lights are actually trying to tell you something about mortality and American mythos and what happens when you realize you’re not immortal after all.
The piece adapts Peter Stephan Jungk’s novel, which imagines Disney as a power-hungry figure in his final months, and what Glass does with it, what Dennis Russell Davies conducted, what Phelim McDermott staged with all those scrims and animated sketches flickering like half remembered dream, is construct this fantasy where Uncle Walt gets to wrestle with an animatronic Lincoln and admit he’s a racist. That scene alone, shit. Disney trying to fix his robot Abraham and realizing he doesn’t share Honest Abe’s views on, you know, basic human dignity. It’s theater of the absurd meets American civil religion meets dying man’s confession booth.
The Teatro Real orchestra apparently handled Glass’s relentless pulse, because it’s always a pulse with him, always that motor running underneath, with real grace. Christopher Purves singing Disney captured the charisma, arrogance, and humanity without turning it into caricature, which is the tightrope you’ve got to walk when you’re playing a guy who everybody already has seventeen opinions about. Some critics found it too tame, too commercial for Glass, not weird enough. Others thought the whole enterprise was a fascinating mess, all concept and no dramatic through line.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? Disney spent his life making everything neat and controlled, every duck quacking on cue, every princess finding her prince. Glass gives us Disney dissolving, fragmentary, haunted by an owl he killed as a kid, talking to Warhol about American iconography while dying of lung cancer in a hospital bed. The man who sold happiness as a commodity confronting the one thing he can’t animate away. That’s some Twilight Zone material right there, except it’s real, or realish, or as real as opera ever gets.
The production embraced that surrealism, cartoon sketches on graph paper coming alive behind the singers, Mickey Mouse gloves floating in the darkness during the death scene. Madrid gave it all the baroque theatrical treatment, which seems appropriate for a piece about a man who built an empire on fantasy. Whether it works as opera or not almost feels beside the point. It’s a document of our relationship with the guy who taught us what to dream about, dissected and set to Philip Glass’s perpetual motion machine. That’s worth something, even if it makes you uncomfortable. Especially if it makes you uncomfortable.