Analysis of Cage's Europera

Extracts taken from 'A light- and soundscape as musical manifesto' by Stefan Beyst (online)

The Material (2): the scenery
As usual in an opera, dancers and singers are integrated in the scenery. Unusual is that also the instrumentalists are integrated. And even more unusual is that the aural appearance of the singers is divorced from their visual appearance. [...] The character they are supposed to embody disappears behind the visual appearance of the singer himself. And that is altogether the case when the pianist has to play in shadow play: where we were supposed to hear music, we eventually get to see a pantomime.

The Material (3): the text
To John Cage, and in tradition of Antonin Artaud, the text - or the plot - is no longer a structuring element, but a material more on the same footing as music, acting and scenery.

The Structure of the operas
But, whereas the Surrealists used random combinations of disparate elements as a way of generating unsuspected resonances between apparently on-related objects, with John Cage it serves the opposite aim: to maintain the independence of the elements combined. And such autonomy goes inexorably lost when the elements are subordinated under an encompassing intention, be it intentionally or unconsciously, 'realistic' or 'surrealistic'.

The Material (4): revisited
'Independent but coexistent' hence: a radical negation of the organic integration of the arts in an encompassing 'Gesamtkunstwerk'. But, precisely therefore, opera is not quite suited for the division in its constituting parts.

Revolution
not only the oppressed parameters are freed from the hegemony of pitch, but also the sounds from the tyranny of music.
John Cage revolts not only against Schönberg-Boulez and Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk van Wagner, but above all against the 'authoritarian society' of which they are but the manifestations.

Composition
"Die Negation des musikalischen Objekts als eines mit sich selber Identischen ist als historische Aufgabe John Cage zugefallen"
Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musik wozu, Literatur zu Noten, p. 223.
[Trans: The negation of the musical object as one with itself identical has fallen to historic task as John Cage]
It is apparent then that Heinz-Klaus Metzger's quotation above misses the mark. He confuses the medium with the message and overlooks that John Cage does not at all free the sound, but rather subordinates it under a discourse on music. And that is not the only metamorphosis that music undergoes under the hands of John Cage.

As long as we can listen to the music that they make, we do not perceive them because we are submerged in the invisible world of music. As soon as they are transformed into sound sources, there appear pianists sitting behind their pianos, and Victrola(s) with their operator(s) as purely visual elements on the scene. And that sheds a new light on the introduction of the 'shadow play'. It appears that this is more than the third step in the silencing of music as described above: it also seals the transformation of music in sound source - an visual object, like the radio or the television in the living room. In that sense, the Europeras are a refined synthesis of both statements of John Cage in 1952: the transformation of music into sound - into soundscape - and the transformation of musical composition into the composition of real, visual and aural objects in real space.

But where we hear the historic recording from the Victrola or the magnificent transcriptions, the broken magic of music is restored in all its splendour. Nobody can remain unmoved by such beauty. To phrase it with Ryan: 'The 78s provide endearing snapshots of an irretrievable past and conjure up an expressivities that is implicit in their materiality--rather like faded old photographs in an album, they appear as images of both mortality and tenderness'.