Years ago, when the composer Dylan Mattingly was working on a new project, he wrote to his collaborator, Thomas Bartscherer, telling him, “I often find that *real* long is better than just long.”
Mattingly followed his own advice – and then some. “Stranger Love,” a singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic opera he and Bartscherer first envisioned eleven years ago, eventually grew to six hours, way past the point where people start to call something impossible to produce .
“We went into it thinking it would never happen, because how could it?” Mattingly, 32, said in a recent interview.
Parts of the piece have been performed in concert. But on Saturday – for the first time, and for one performance only – the whole thing will be performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which has embraced “Stranger Love” as one of its trademarks. -the-sky presentations.
“Young, emerging artists with big ideas deserve a place to see that work,” said Chad Smith, the Philharmonic’s CEO. “If the big institutions aren’t swinging to the brim, then why are we here?”
Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz and played by Contemporaneous – the ensemble Mattingly founded as a student at Bard College with David Bloom, who will conduct – “Stranger Love” isn’t exactly Puccini, even if it depicts a love story of sorts. Largely abstract and intensely serious, slowly telescoping into the cosmic sphere, it offers more of a heightened experience than a concrete plot.
“The atmosphere of the piece is something special,” said composer John Adams, a longtime friend and mentor of Mattingly. “I believe its length is part of the spiritual – what can I say? – his spiritual impulse.
“Stranger Love” is reminiscent of two other operas that maintain a time-inducing tone of meditative ecstasy for hours on end, “Einstein on the Beach” by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson and “Saint François d’Assise” by Olivier Messiaen. Its sensibility was shaped by a CD Mattingly grew up on featuring the Tahitian Choir: “this glorious, polyphonic, joyful sound,” he said, “that moves around itself and solidifies and drifts apart.” Glass’s early minimalism is also present in the score’s vast expanse of shifting harmonies and repeating rhythms.
Three pianos, each tuned slightly differently, lend a hazy, honky-tonk feel to some of the music, at times offering a clattering evocation of gamelan, a band featuring the open-eared, pan-Pacific California spirit of Harry Partch and Lou Harrison.
There is something of the luscious over-ripeness of Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie” and the wavy fragrance of Debussy. And echoes of the stylized approach to character and the deceptively simple, at times almost childlike sound world of Meredith Monk’s wordless opera ‘Atlas’, which Mattingly says he listened to (literally) every night for a year before starting on ‘Stranger Love’.
His piece seems to float above the current themes of so much new music. “It doesn’t tell you who to vote for or where to take a stand on an issue,” Bartscherer said, “but it asks you to imagine a world that could be different.”
“I also think commitment to joy is an interesting politics,” Blain-Cruz said. “The commitment to fight for the beauty in life for people to see and appreciate. Like, don’t kill our world; let’s see it in its splendor and see that it is worth fighting for.”
Bartscherer’s reserve text manages references to Anne Carson, Octavio Paz and Matthew Arnold, among others. A writer, translator and scholar, he was one of Mattingly’s first professors at Bard, and quickly became a fan of Contemporaneous after its formation in 2010. Leaving one of the group’s concerts, Bartscherer had a vague idea for a piece of musical theater : there would be two lovestruck voices whose relationship develops, facing symbolic conflicts from within and without, before being resolved, all during a cycle of the four seasons.
He shared the idea with Mattingly, who had been composing since he was 6, but wanted to try writing vocal music. Passing equipment back and forth, they soon went to the races; the two talk about “Stranger Love” almost as something that already fully existed, in a particular realm, that needed to be discovered or channeled more than consciously created.
“It was out there somewhere,” Bartscherer said. “And Dylan’s antenna somehow heard it.”
At some point, they stopped trying to get the project into a traditionally manageable length, embracing the kind of epic world-building that Mattingly loved in “The Lord of the Rings” and “Battlestar Galactica.” During a 2014 visit to Point Reyes, on the California coast, Mattingly had a vision: the already sprawling score he and Bartscherer had been working on was just Act I.
Two more acts would follow in this new conception, in which the voices would gradually fade away and the scope of the opera would be expanded to include first human lovers beyond the original pair, and then the expanding universe.
It took years to complete, even given Mattingly’s single-minded focus. “Sometimes you have students and you talk to them, and it takes you two years to realize that what you’re talking about has seeped into their everyday lives,” said composer David Lang, one of Mattingly’s teachers during graduate school at Yale. “But he made music so fluid and in such a dedicated way that everything we talked about came right out in the work.”
Mattingly and Bartscherer briefly considered producing “Stranger Love” themselves, perhaps in an airplane hangar, but it was clear the cost would be prohibitive without an institutional partner. There were a lot of ignored emails from arts organizations; some who answered said they couldn’t say yes without seeing it first.
A concert performance of the nearly four-hour first act, hosted by Beth Morrison and the Prototype festival in 2018, proved the viability of the material – at least for the creators. But it wasn’t until Adams Smith of the Los Angeles Philharmonic encouraged viewing of the score, and Mattingly began sending recorded excerpts, that the long-finished “Stranger Love” was commissioned ex post facto by the Philharmonic for a staged performance. performance. production.
Blain-Cruz said her staging was intended to be “both super simple and super grand”, with projections (designed by Hannah Wasileski) evoking the natural world and beyond. Chris Emile’s choreography is inspired by the cyclic movements of the planets and seasons.
“Chris as a choreographer is one who is tapped into — not lightly or eloquently, but from the mind,” said Blain-Cruz. “All of his physical work reaches levels of possession in some respects. Dylan mentions gospel music and spiritual music, which encourages people to open up. And I think the choreography fits that.”
Will “Stranger Love” Have a Life After Saturday? Mattingly has dreamed of doing it at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. But in the meantime he and Bartscherer are already working on another project. They claim it will be shorter, but the title – “History of Life” – does not give the impression that their scope has become less ambitious.
“I expressed my concern,” said Adams, “that Dylan was creating a body of work that would always be challenging to produce. And then I felt like a horrible old dad, like, ‘Are you going to get a job?’ He is willing to just live an extremely humble life, completely devoted to his art.”