Now Reimann has sought an operatic language for his three selected Maeterlinck pieces, and to make of them a single work of roughly 85 intermissionless minutes, unified by the theme of Death. I’ll take up each segment separately, first as play, then as opera, and then give some consideration to the whole and to the performance. And I want to emphasize something we are inclined to overlook: I am not evaluating, or even describing, Reimann’s L’Invisible. That is possible only in the theatre. I am reporting the first impressions of a recording of the music of L’Invisible, its sounds now fixed in a document as surely as are written words on paper. Even its whiffs of theatrical atmosphere, trailing in from their live-performance origins, are fossils now. In our overwired, overscreened world, it’s easy to forget that while the secondary oralities are realities in themselves, they cannot be theatre as theatre, or opera as opera. And that is even more true when our first experience of a work is via such a document.

In The Intruder (I’ll use the English titles from here on), a mother lies in an offstage room on one side, in mortal danger following childbirth. In a room off the other side is her baby, who has been silent and motionless (like a wax figure—a favorite Maeterlinck image) since birth. Onstage, the mother’s family—the father, the grandfather, an uncle, and three daughters—are on vigil, grouped around a table on which burns a single lamp, the only source of light in the room. It’s a typical Maeterlinckian setup: an apparently ordinary family living a quotidian bourgeois life, pursuing their conversational habits according to their everyday understandings, but surrounded by imminent death and/or some other presence, some other plane of reality, that conditions the atmosphere. They await the promised arrival of the uncle’s sister, who is the Mother Superior of a convent, at nine, and of a doctor, at midnight. A couple of related themes, again typical of the author, work their way through to the final event—those of light and blindness (the blindness being a metaphor for a different sightedness), and of age in relation to this other kind of sight, the oldest and youngest being nearest to an intuitive awareness of another, higher understanding. Thus, the grandfather, being both old and blind (“He can just make out a very bright light,” says the father) has sensings of the surround and premonitions of happenings that the others do not possess, and this is a source of friction, since the others naturally consider themselves the sighted ones. (The uncle: “But he wasn’t this way . . . before . . . . was he?” The father: “No, he used to be as sensible as the rest of us.”)

After much discussion of the situation and of differing interpretations of mysterious events (has someone entered the house? the garden? why hasn’t the sister arrived? why have the nightingales stopped singing? etc.), the lamp dims, flickers, and dies, leaving the family in suspenseful darkness. Suddenly, there is a wail of terror from the infant’s room—the first sounds it’s made since birth—and then the door to the mother’s room opens, flooding the onstage room with light and disclosing a Sister of Charity, who signals the mother’s death. Everyone files into the dead mother’s room, except for the grandfather. He saw the truth first, but now is left, tapping around the table, in the darkness. In his redaction of The Intruder for his libretto, Reimann has paid only token attention to these themes, doubtless calculating that they will in any case be conveyed in production, and wishing to cleave to the main incident of the mother’s death, the baby’s scream. He thus passes over much in the play that I would have thought most interesting for a composer to capture, and most characteristically Maeterlinckian. But of course he is not obliged to follow my preferences, and is incorporating The Intruder into a longer piece. So let me try to convey a suggestion of how Reimann has set his text.