Just at it is hard, subject matter aside, to imagine an Adamsesque opera having been written in Germany (I suppose that Henze in political phase would come the closest, but that not very), it is difficult to conceive of a Reimannesque one being brought forth in America. For a time at the height of the atonal/serial influence here, it might have seemed plausible; there was, for instance, Roger Sessions’ Montezuma. But the only American composer I can think of who produced a body of work along such musical lines (and had it performed) was Hugo Weisgall, who began with what could properly be termed pieces of European Litteraturoper (on Wedekind’s The Tenor and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author), then went Biblical. He had champions, but his oeuvre shows no sign of revival.

Perhaps Reimann’s L’Invisible will prove a last gasp of European High Modernist opera. If so, I suspect that its fierce idiom, its hard-pew ordeal character, will be mourned by only a dwindling few, and I myself will only be standing at a respectful distance from the bereaved, like The Stranger in Interior, feeling the loss as in someone else’s family. Yet I will feel at least that. In L’Invisible, a strong libretto has been hewn from plays by a writer who addresses the  meanings of subjects of the most profound human concern, and who casts a spell in the attempt. The composer has then tackled the text with highest aspiration and integrity, and with no concession to the “unsympathetic.” Do I want to live with his opera, to hear it repeatedly in the hands of new singers, new directors and conductors? Probably not, even to the extent that I may with, say, George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, written with comparable seriousness of purpose but in a more accessible, if quirky, musical style. But I admire it, feel a power in it, and in the unlikely event that it finds a production within striking distance, will try to see it.

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Supplemental  Maeterlinck mini-bibliography (to add to the items at the end of the Pelléas et Mélisande post, 2/15/19):

Frantisek Deak: Symbolist Theater/The Formation of an Avant-Garde, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993. This is a thorough, insightful recounting of the development of the French Symbolist movement, with acute observations on its theory and, more rarely, deeply researched reports on the actual productions of Symbolist plays. Beyond Maeterlinck and Pelléas, opera devotees will be interested in the long chapter on Wagner’s influence on French literature in general, and the Symbolists in particular, which Deak traces from Baudelaire’s famous essay on Tannhäuser in Paris through the responses of Mallarmé, the writers of La Revue Wagnérienne, and the French occultists, including Joséphin Péladan and his orders of the Rosy Cross. There’s much else on the Parisian avant-garde theatres, and an extensive bibliography. A valuable volume.

Leeper, Janet: Edward Gordon Craig/Designs for the Theatre (Penguin, 1948). There is a brief telling of Craig’s life and career; a detailed chronology of his travels and doings; and finally a series of forty lovely plates, taken from photos, etchings, woodcuts, and prints—all renderings of Craig’s costume and set designs—that give a better idea of the theatrical aesthetic of this influential visionary than any description or analysis. From the extensive literature on Craig, I am also familiar with the biography, also copiously illustrated, written by his son, Edward (Knopf, 1968), and with Craig’s biography of his mother, the great actress Ellen Terry, both easily recommendable to anyone interested.