Between The Intruder and Interior, three falsettists sing an Interlude. The libretto attributes words to them, but none can be distinguished. There is only a tonal mush with a cloister-like echo. Then, as Hanusa notes in his article, there is a marked change in sonority, for the woodwinds now join the strings-only scoring of The Intruder, and dominate that of Interior much of the time. Here is what happens in Interior: The forestage shows us an old garden with willows. Upstage, three ground-floor windows allow us to see into a lighted room wherein is gathered another bourgeois family. The father sits in the chimney-corner. The mother, one elbow on the table and her infant sleeping on her shoulder, stares into nothing. Two daughters in white sit dreamily and seemingly contentedly. We can’t hear them, but we watch them move about. A Stranger, evidently on his way through town, has found a young woman floating dead in a stream. He has retrieved her body and alerted the locals, among them an Old Man who recognizes her as the third daughter of the family we are watching. Now The Stranger and the Old Man stand in the garden behind the house, observing the family through the windows while discussing the day’s tragic event; the strong possibility that the drowned daughter has taken her own life; and above all when and how to inform the family. After a time, the Old Man’s two granddaughters enter the garden in succession, inquiring whether or not the family has been told the news, and announcing that the entire village is on its way to the house with the bier of the dead girl. Finally, as the villagers are arriving, the Old Man makes his way around to the front of the house. We see him enter through the front door and speak to the family. We see the news register and commotion ensue. Then, they all exit out the front door. The Stranger and the two granddaughters gaze in through the windows at the infant, who has been left behind and has not awakened. As in The Intruder, Reimann has cut the dialogue, losing some of the richness of the exchanges between the Old Man and The Stranger in favor of concision.

Reimann’s harmonic idiom does not alter from one section of L’Invisible to the next, but the change in instrumentation, particularly in the use of the low woodwind timbres, produces a new, less austere, and to my ear more listener-friendly, sonority. The vocal line, as well, though still replete with hesitations and curlicues, is somewhat less chopped and its tessitura less extreme. I couldn’t always follow, though, the logic of the many sudden dynamic (soft/loud) shifts, at least as rendered here. At the conclusion of Intérieur, the three falsettists are heard again, this time singing separately, so that some of their premonitory hints are comprehensible. As we move into The Death of Tintagiles, there is another, momentarily shocking, change in sonority. Thundering tympani and snarling brass enter the picture, and the strings sometimes take their fingernails off the asbestos. This aggressive, opened-out full-orchestra handling of the sound materials reflects a more active role for Death: instead of the quiet, offstage passing of a mother or the aftermath of an Ophelia-like drowning, we are presented here with a murder that will happen in “real” stage time, and is foreseen from the start.