The Philip Glass opera The Perfect American, premiered in Spain in 2013 (the performance reproduced here), is based on a 2001 German novel by Peter Stephan Jungk that traffics in the various dark rumors that swirled around Walt Disney in the years just before and after his death. Disney, it is suggested, was racist, anti-Semitic, and bent on cheating death itself through cryogenics. There was a bit of smoke surrounding each of these allegations, but basically no fire, and listeners may be troubled by the way the story plays ...
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The Philip Glass opera The Perfect American, premiered in Spain in 2013 (the performance reproduced here), is based on a 2001 German novel by Peter Stephan Jungk that traffics in the various dark rumors that swirled around Walt Disney in the years just before and after his death. Disney, it is suggested, was racist, anti-Semitic, and bent on cheating death itself through cryogenics. There was a bit of smoke surrounding each of these allegations, but basically no fire, and listeners may be troubled by the way the story plays fast and loose with historical fact (cryogenics was little known in the mid-1960s, for example, and it is unlikely that Disney had even heard of it). With this caveat out of the way, however, this is Glass' most dramatically effective opera in some time. The opera consists of a prologue and 12 scenes, seven in the first act and five in the second. The plot recounts supposed episodes from the end of Disney's life, as he contemplates his impending death, his legacy, the culture around...
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