When is having a repetitive song playing over and over again in your head for days not completely annoying? When it is the music of Phillip Glass’s opera Orphee. It is haunting and tragic with a spark of hope, beckoning like a siren song calling me back again and again.
This modernist opera is very different from the grand sweeping music of Wagner or Puccini. There is a meditative quality. Glass borrows from eastern music and transcendental meditation for a minimalist style using repetition of simple phrases to lull the listener into to focusing on one idea for a longer time. The music repeats and repeats like ocean waves, never letting go. I’m caught in this wave of contemplation with a sense of urgency and despair.
Lisa Cole Smith
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In Orphee a young poet wrestles with success as his popularity with the masses has made him unpopular with his peers. In essence, his success has made him a sellout. Retreating from the pressure of public life, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman who turns out to be his own death. He is in love with death personified and she in return is in love with him. He loses his wife, Eurydice, who is pregnant with his creation — with life, because he is distracted by cryptic messages from beyond the grave. Though so much is available to him, he wants more — he wants immortality. Orphee is a tale of warning — of obsession, death and mortality. It reminds us that like the Sin crouching at Cain’s door, we are all faced with the distractions we must master. We all suffer from the disease of self-obsession and live in a world addicted to self-destruction.
The day after I saw the opera, Whitney Houston died. Over the weekend her passing was mourned at the Grammy Awards and in coming weeks her funeral will be center stage. The party she was scheduled to attend the night of her death went on as she “would have wanted the music to go on.”
Houston died a star even though she hadn’t been active as one in quite some time. Her drug addiction made it impossible for her to continue working, impossible for her to be what everyone hoped she would be. Like Orphee, she resorted to obsessive self-destruction to drown out the voices of expectation and desire.
This is a familiar story; Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse were headlines only a short time ago. These people were alternately idolized for their talent and mocked for their weaknesses. Not only Hollywood, but we as consumers of media (as opposed to patrons of the arts) were content for them to perform as clowns if not as musicians — as long as they kept us entertained.
I think these deaths shine light on the fans and peers as much as the stars. We see the obsessive need of our culture to have mirrors we can look in to reflect our desires and to smash when they turn ugly. In death, we can take this even further. We can immortalize celebrities as perfect talents, no longer having to feel sadness for the talent going to waste. We can remember only their accomplishments and it will become rude to remember their insane antics. We can cast them however we need and don’t have to pay them a dime. We can finally make them the idols we want without a twinge of guilt about objectifying them.
We live in a world where it is harder and harder to see what real love and real life looks like. Honesty doesn’t mean much because truth is subjective, so how can we speak into one another’s lives in meaningful ways? Instead we help one another self-destruct by telling each other what we want to hear and indulging our impulsive behavior. What does it say about our collective apathy as a self-destructive nation if celebrity is the highest achievement in American culture and watching them fall is an American pasttime?
I don’t see the church as immune to this either. In some ways it can be even more difficult. We too often equate loving people with being nice to them, forgetting that what is best for us as humans often is difficult, even painful and discipline is rarely fun.
The music of Orphee is compelling me to meditate on my own self-destructive tendencies and traps, especially at church. The wrestling between success and substance, pleasing God verses pleasing man. The constant siren song of what “could be” turning my focus from what God has already given. In the opera, the underworld is reached by passing through mirrors. Those who want to avoid premature death are told to divert their eyes. If you look too long, you might be pulled in. Looking too long in the mirror, one misses life altogether.
Lisa Cole Smith ([email protected]) is pastor of Convergence: A Creative Community of Faith in Alexandria, Va.