Opera: Is Philip Glass’ trying to bore his way into immortality?

First nights at English National Opera are, in the main, matters for a sociologist rather than an opera critic. That emphatically wasn’t the case with Wozzeck, but that is an acknowledged grim masterpiece, though still, nearly 90 years on, enough to put off casual opera goers and trendies. But the succession of vacuous new works that ENO has mounted in the past few years has attracted audiences, at any rate first-nighters, of a kind that one doesn’t see at any other operatic performance. They arrive early to kiss and shout and drink champagne, they trickle into the auditorium very slowly, stopping for many hugs on the way to their seats, and their talk in the interval is about anything other than the performance they are at. Inexpert at spotting celebrities or other media persons, I rely on my guests to tell me who some of these people are, and am left none the wiser about why they are there, who invites them and what their reactions might be.

Philip Glass’s The Perfect American, his 24th opera (he has written another one since), was premièred in Madrid in January, and is now performed in London in collaboration with Improbable, ‘a place or a set of values as much as a company’, we are told. This piece is adapted from a novel by Peter Stephan Jungk about the last months of Walt Disney, and the libretto is by Rudy Wurlitzer. Why an opera about Disney, one might wonder, and reflect that he was a moderately complex and more than moderately unsavoury person, so his decline and death might hold some interest; and the main focus of Jungk’s novel is that a disgruntled former employee of Disney, William Dantine, persecutes his old boss for having ripped off his, Dantine’s, ideas and never given him any credit, accusing him of being no more than ‘a mediocre CEO’.