An Opera Imagined through Painting
The idea for The Magic Sea has accompanied me for decades. It received fresh impetus in 2007 when I encountered La Fura dels Baus’ Valencia production of Wagner’s Ring. I was drawn to the possibility of music, poetry, drama and visual art forming one experience — the Gesamtkunstwerk.[1]
The Magic Sea and Richard Wagner
Wagner’s recurring musical motifs can attach to a character, an object or a force: the Rhine, the sword, the ring. What interests me is how a motif can change as the drama develops. Could painted forms do something comparable?
Opera already brings together music, performance, text and stage design. In The Magic Sea, I would like the changing visual world to carry the action itself. Painted forms, light and space would become protagonists, developing alongside the music.
The Concept
The idea may sound utopian, but sketching it is already worthwhile to me. I want to outline an opera in which the images tell the story, and in which we could influence how that story unfolds. The pictures below are studies and stages of an idea. I will stay close to the visual sequence, especially its beginning and ending.
From Paintings to an Immersive Visual Space
I imagine the paintings becoming a changing environment around an audience, rather than remaining on a wall in front of it. Digital projection, and perhaps AI-assisted transformation, could be tools to explore. How well they would serve this particular work would need testing. The starting material would be my paintings, sketches and musical ideas.[2]
What Begins with Painting?
The painted studies would supply the vocabulary: colours, forms, changes of scale and movements through space. Music and narrative would meet those visual decisions. I want to follow the development of an idea before deciding what a finished production would require.
The sea became the central metaphor of the project because it can suggest origin, transformation and return. It can appear calm or violent, empty or full, formless yet constantly producing forms. These oppositions also connect with ideas that have long interested me in Chinese philosophy and painting, particularly the relationship between emptiness and form. Visually, however, the project remains primarily an experiment in abstraction, light, movement and space.
Overture
The opera begins in almost complete darkness. Gradually, faint areas of light emerge and an abstract visual world begins to take shape. Sea and space remain indistinguishable; the scene might suggest a microcosm or a macrocosm, something infinitely small or immeasurably large. Form emerges from formlessness, movement from stillness. Rather than illustrating a specific place, the opening establishes the visual language from which the following acts will develop.
Act 1
In the first act, diffuse light begins to form spaces and structures. Warm tones gradually give way to colder ones. I think of this as a kind of imagined chaos, from which distinguishable forms emerge.
The recurring themes would include abstraction and recognisable form, darkness and white as light. At first, light defines particular places. The stage-like space in detail 1 opens out in detail 2, while the forms in detail 1a suggest faces or sea creatures.
The question raised in New Horizon becomes central here: what happens when we imagine ourselves within an image, with space behind us as well as in front?
The light leads us further and further into the depths of the sea and reveals new worlds to us.
Changes in colour and shape alter the world that develops. These enlarged details help me see what a few marks might become.
Act 2
The second act begins again with a very abstract image, which again outlines the events of the act through themes and composition.
The forms grow denser. Recognisable shapes and abstraction press against one another; I imagine the music gathering force with them.
The tension builds towards a release…
…a force rising from the depths, circling the earth and drawing everything back down. This is the imagined action of the opera, rather than an illustration of a real event.
Act 3
The third act begins with the calm after the storm. In my imagined story, the “gluttonous fish” has swallowed everything. The crowded world slowly settles.
A detail suggests the head of that “gluttonous fish”.
Sky and sea begin to harmonize again and the light shows the way.
White, as light and principle, is taking up more and more space. The abstract and the concrete have found a playful and harmonious coexistence.
Closing Scene
We have returned to emptiness, but it is no longer the darkness from which the opera began. It is now luminous and open, containing the possibility of another beginning. The cycle closes where it began: with a space from which forms may once again emerge.
The last stroke I added to this picture was the small blue form at the upper left. It is easy to miss, yet it matters to the whole arrangement. To me it can belong to sea or sky, suggest fish or bird, movement or rest. Following a curve down towards the lower edge leads the eye to its opposite: a burst of activity.
The final detail isolates that delicate blue movement. In the white space around it, another beginning remains possible.
What If?
What if the opera never becomes a production?
That possibility is already part of the idea. While writing these notes, I thought of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and its dream of an opera house in the jungle. The picture of Klaus Kinski with his cigar and the upholstered chair makes me smile. A grand plan need not end exactly as imagined to leave something worth having.
If my own opera remains a collection of paintings and thoughts, I can still enjoy what it has set in motion. Perhaps I will sit contentedly beside the opera director’s velvet chair. At least that part of the production is within reach.
Footnotes
[1] La Fura dels Baus’ production record for Die Walküre gives its Valencia premiere as 30 April 2007. The Ring production was a collaboration with the Palau de les Arts and Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. ↩
[2] For the imagined musical contrasts, I would bring together Wagner and Japanese koto music, with music by Brian Eno as a supporting base. These are ideas for the project, rather than a statement about a finished score. ↩
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