The artistic life, boldly composed

The year-end issue of Art Forum is full of 10-best lists, five of them on music. If this is any indication, then all the art world listens to is pop and jazz. There is nothing from contemporary so-called art music, little experimental or musically new or groundbreaking. Decidedly no opera.

Fortunately, such blindness (deafness?) is not mutual. Experimental and traditional composers alike have long had a healthy engagement with the visual arts. During the past several years, there have been operas or music theater pieces about Van Gogh (Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “Vincent�), John Ruskin (David Lang’s “Modern Painters�), Frank Lloyd Wright (Daron Hagen’s “Shining Bow�), Eadweard Muybridge (Philip Glass’ “The Photographer�), Marcel Duchamp (Glass’ “The Mysteries and Want’s So Funny?�), Georges Seurat (Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George�), Adolf Woelfli (Terry Riley’s “The Saint Adolf Ring�), Johannes Vermeer (Louis Andriessen’s “Writing to Vermeer�). The latest painter opera is Michael Nyman’s “Facing Goya,� first performed in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, two years ago and revised for a production in Karlsruhe, Germany, last fall.

What is fascinating about these works is that the visual arts typically inspire composers to think, so to speak, outside the box. “Opera is not going to get anywhere anymore with the straightforward realistic or naturalistic prose theater; that we’ve had,� Virgil Thomson complained back in 1966. Trying to stick 20th century music onto 19th century dramatic sensibilities he considered “dead as a doornail.� These are prescient thoughts, considering the way rusty doornails continue to pile up, what with one unimaginative new opera after another as, again in Thomson’s words, “cut-down versions� of successful plays, films or novels.

Thomson, of course, had a chip on his shoulder. About four decades earlier, he and Gertrude Stein had set out to reform opera with “Four Saints in Three Acts.� Composer and poet viewed the life of saints as parallel to theirs as artists who guide others toward discipline and spontaneity, and maybe, through their work, create little miracles. “Four Saints� is constructed like a Cubist painting, whereby short episodes of easily recognizable sentences and musical phrases don’t necessarily line up, leaving the listeners free to mentally put the various perspectives on the characters and the ideas together in their own way.

“Facing Goya� chooses a historical subject to reflect the strong issues of race, class, criminality and cloning that are part of our daily news. A financier called an art banker, learning that Goya’s skull was not buried with the rest of his body, makes it her mission to find the skull and return it to the artist’s grave in Bordeaux.

In her search for the missing skull, the art banker travels through history, first to a 19th century craniology lab, where the measurement of skulls is thought to determine human character and racial superiority. Next she finds herself in a 1930s German art gallery, where Nazi art critics are condemning degenerate art. Finally, she makes her way to a modern biotech lab, where she collaborates in the cloning of Goya from a sample of his DNA, which angers the new version of the Spanish painter no end.

Catchy Minimalism

This is an opera as chock-full of arguments about the nature of artistic genius and the intrusion of science as they have evolved since Goya’s death in 1828 as it is about the ideas reflected in Goya’s work. “Goya saw Hitler before Hitler saw Goya!� is the art banker’s most memorable line.

Nyman’s music is built much like Thomson’s was in “Four Saints.� Short episodes, often containing clever, memorable hooks, carry words but don’t necessarily reveal a one-to-one relationship between tone and emotion. The style is determinedly Minimalist; Nyman coined the term for the repetitive music of Glass and Steve Reich in 1967. But the sound is all his own. The Nyman band’s sound emphasizes piercing high violins and winds underpinned by deep, throbbing bass. It is as flavorful as Henry Purcell, up-to-date and catchy as modern pop. After a couple of hearings, expect to be faced with “Goya� tunes stuck in your head.

It is only in Victoria Hardie’s libretto that “Facing Goya� doesn’t live up to the Thomson-Stein model. Although the librettist ingeniously manages to turn a wealth of scientific data, historical material and aesthetic theory into exciting theater, she can be a clunky writer straining for cleverness. “Weigh the brain / That’s my new refrain,� a craniologist sings.

Then again, Nyman’s energetic, driving music allows only selective words to be understood, no matter how hard-working the cast of fine singers. All but the art banker take on multiple roles -- as craniologists, art critics and geneticists -- but maintain certain aspects of their characters, as if reincarnated in different generations and professions; and their musical style stays with them as well.

“Facing Goya� is perhaps most closely reminiscent of the brilliant soundtracks Nyman wrote for Peter Greenaway’s most startling films in the 1980s (“The Draughtsman’s Contract,� “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover�). And its fanciful response to art and obsession with numbers, data, theories practically calls out for an elaborate, obsessively detailed and beautiful Greenaway-style production, although that is unlikely, the composer having had a falling out with the filmmaker after their collaboration on “Prospero’s Books.�

Still, it is great to see Nyman -- whose post-Greenaway film work, most famously “The Piano,� can be mundane -- producing the striking and important opera he has always seemed to have in him. That big-budget conventional opera companies don’t seem to notice (Santiago de Compostela and Karlsruhe are hardly operatic capitals) may not surprise. That the art world appears just as conventional and clueless about such a gift to it, however, is distressing.

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Nyman’s latest

Michael Nyman: “Facing Goya�

Winnie Bowe, Marie Angel, Hilary Summers, Harry Nicoll, Omar Ebrahim; Michael Nyman Band, Michael Nyman, conductor (Warner Classics)

Rating: ***