A Legend Turns Into a Virtual Nobody

La Scala is not looking too inviting from the outside these days. The world’s leading opera house could use a cleaning. The paint is peeling on its shuttered doors, and there is even graffiti. One could easily conclude that no one was there.

And that has been exactly the case in two ironic senses. Last week, the theater went on strike, canceling what was to have been the world premiere last Wednesday of Luciano Berio’s opera “Outis.” With the labor dispute settled by week’s end, the premiere was hastily shifted to Saturday, but still no one was there, since the title of the opera, and the name of its main character, is the Italian word for nobody.

The havoc caused by the strike was, indeed, large. International opera followers and press had already struggled to get into hotels during the chaos of fashion week, only to have to come again. Berio is Italy’s most important composer of the second half of the 20th century, and Milan is in the midst of a Berio festival in celebration of the artist’s 70th birthday--which was last October, but things work like that here. Moreover, this is the most important new European opera of the season.

But the havoc was also entirely appropriate, from the evidence of the second performance of “Outis,” on Monday night. The opera, like La Scala and like Milan, may seem disordered on the surface, but once inside, it is lush, beautiful and sophisticated.

Berio was once the most lyrical and theatrical voice of the European avant-garde. And while he still employs many of the Modernist techniques of the ‘50s and ‘60s, he increasingly employs history as well--rewriting, reorchestrating, reinterpreting music of many centuries through his own voice. He calls it “remembering the future.”

“Outis” attempts to do this theatrically. The libretto, made by an Italian classicist, Dario Del Corno, considers what Ulysses has represented throughout European history as Homer’s hero has been reborn again and again in different interpretations. Composed of quotes from James Joyce, Paul Celan, Bertold Brecht, Shakespeare, Herman Melville, W.H. Auden and others, it takes its title from the deceptive response Ulysses gave to the Cyclops: “My name is no one.”

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In “Outis,” a double of Ulysses is killed by his son, Steve, five times and in five different ways, at the beginning of five dramatic cycles. Outis then enters into five strange, inexplicable situations. In the most provocative one, he finds himself in a crazy bank where clerks play a game with three chairs, take off their clothes and prove to be sexy women who start an orgy. Everyone exits through a tunnel, emerging from between Emily’s legs. Emily, a sort of Penelope, is Outis’ wife.

And so such things go. There is a scene set in a supermarket from hell; another for a nasty group of children playing a war game and meaning it. Throughout the opera, characters come and go, and you can’t really tell them without a playlist. One prominent one is Ada, a dressmaker who busily measures everyone. There are clowns who play ingratiating pop music. And by the end, Outis and Emily (along with their doubles) are in concert dress on a black stage, bare but for two grand pianos. The opera ends, with a moving concerto for four voices.

“Outis” is designed to make musical, rather than narrative, sense. It breaks no new ground for Berio--one immediately recognizes the composer’s sound, a kind of ocean of voices and instruments with ever-changing focus in which one regularly gets lost and then finds oneself again. But it is the work of a master, and it can hold the listener easily enthralled for its two hours.

Unfortunately, the work’s serious ambition is undercut by Graham Vick’s shallow production. The British director favors images that are striking though not terribly telling. His influences are obvious--Peter Sellars’ televisions, Robert Wilson’s curious characters, Peter Greenaway’s nudity (R-rated here). The look has the glitz of advertising and is not unappealing, but nothing resonates. Vick illustrates ambiguous abstractions with comic-book realism.

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Still, La Scala has, despite its naughty strike, gone all out for Berio and his uncompromising work. If the very large cast did not have any theatrical standouts, the singing was solid. And there was a good deal of work for many, many people, including a fine troupe of acrobatic dancers and an excellent chorus. It also brought in Berio’s favorite vocal group, the Swingel Singers. The American conductor, David Robertson, who comes from Los Angeles but is mainly known only in Europe, did an outstanding job of keeping the whole project in control.

Berio’s nobody may not be for everyone, but America is behind the times, not having seen a Berio opera since he created “Opera” with New York’s Living Theater more than 25 years ago. At last, though, next month, Chicago Lyric Opera will give the American premiere of his 1984 opera, “Un Re in Ascolta,” with a libretto by Italo Calvino.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is in discussions with the composer, a favorite of Esa-Pekka Salonen, for a major new orchestra piece.