Every so often, the subject presents itself again, even to those of us who approach opera primarily from a day-to-day, performance-oriented p.o.v.: the European/American sensibility gap. I’m not convinced that, in terms of the responses of the large majority of devotees, it’s as wide as it is made to appear in scholarly examination or journalistic report, but there’s no doubt that it exists, and that it affects attitudes toward both creation and performance. I sometimes have occasion here to address the performance aspects, since examples of European direction and design, including some of the heavy-duty conceptual variety, do come our way. But with respect to new creation, especially of the High Modernist sort (and most European work has been of that sort for a couple of lifetimes now), our soil has yielded little to the occasional scatterings of European seed.

The sensibility gap has a way of drifting back into consciousness in the operatic shoulder season of late spring, and so it has been this year, at least for me, as I considered what’s worthy of attention over the summer. Events like the long-awaited premiere of Gregory Kurtag’s Fin de partie (a setting of Beckett’s Endgame) at La Scala, or the air-land Operation Licht that hauled several days’-worth (but still not all!) of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s immense entity (opera? postopera?) into existence over in The Netherlands, aren’t on my beat. But, casting about among recent audio and video documents of Continental origin, I spied L’Invisible, a piece of potential interest on two counts: it is by a long-established High Modern composer of whom I should know more (Aribert Reimann), and is based on plays by a writer I have always found intriguing (Maurice Maeterlinck). This sounded like a good sensibility-gap test case, so I acquired the Oehms Classics recording based on L’Invisible‘s world premiere production (October, 2017, at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, Donald Runnicles, cond.), and began to explore.

My only previous acquaintance with Reimann’s music was a stretch of the final scene of his Lear, included in the video set Autumn Journey, a retrospective on Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who first sang the title role. (This extract is now online.) Though Lear wasn’t Reimann’s first opera, it was the one that jump-started his reputation as a composer (he is also a noted accompanist, especially in modern repertory), but he has written a number of others. They are all based on the work of serious writers (in addition to Shakespeare: Strindberg, Goll, Euripides, Kafka, Lorca, Grillparzer, and now Maeterlinck), and are thus said to belong to the genre of Litteraturoper. I have always found this a rather baffling category, first because it would seem to take in the overwhelming majority of all operas, at least from Mozart on, and second  because, in Reimann’s case, with the exception of Kafka’s The Castle, these sources are all plays—yet these plays are being referred to strictly as literature, and not as works for performance, so the term makes us wonder about the theatrical awareness of those who use it. Well, it’s only a category, after all, and where Maeterlinck is concerned, it does serve to remind us that, unless one is exceedingly old and was taken to see The Bluebird when exceedingly young, one has in all probability never encountered his plays—even Pelléas et Mélisande, the play—except on the page.